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This book provides an in-depth look into the cognitive and argumentative nature of political discourse with a focus on the role and place of conceptual metaphors in practical argumentation. Neagu´s empirical investigation centres on the corpus of the American Presidential debates in 2008 and speeches by Barack Obama from 2009-2011.

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List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Political Discourse Analysis 3. Cognitive Linguistic Theory of Metaphor: an Overview 4. The Cognitive and Argumentative Nature of Political Discourse 5. Conceptual Metaphors as Defeasible Arguments 6. Decoding Conceptual Metaphors 7. Conceptualizing the Financial Crisis 8. Politics is Conflict, Politics is Vision 9. The Stars and the Dogs of the Company Called America 10. Politics is Ethics 11. Symbolic Power and Argumentation 12. Sound Moves or Political Leverage? 13. Politeness, Argumentative Schemes, and Ethos Construction 14. Argumentation on War 15. Concluding Thoughts 16. Horizons of Truth and the Moral Victory 17. Contributions of This Study Appendix 1 Corpus Bibliography Index of Conceptual Metaphors General Index

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"This is a valuable addition to the existing literature on cognitive and argumentative approaches to political discourse." - Isabela Fairclough, University of Central Lancashire, UK

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Maria-Ionela Neagu is Senior Lecturer in the Philology Department at Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, Romania. Her previous publications include Language Education Policies in Romania (2008, Romanian edition) and English Syntax. Basic Concepts: the Syntax of the Simple Sentence (2009).

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