The Reframer: An Analysis of Barack Obama’s Political Discourse (2004-2010)

This book is an effort to understand, with the tools of linguistic analysis, what the salient features of President Obama’s discourse are. This has been achieved by adopting a challenging research framework that combines the Analysis of Political Discourse with Corpus Linguistics techniques and recent Cognitive Linguistics findings. The research explores the rise of the so-called “cognitive policy” since Obama’s 2004 Keynote Speech to the Democratic National Convention. The analyses are carried out along the continuum of van Dijk’s sociolinguistic model and Entman’s work on cascading networks in political communication. The study is both theoretical and empirically-grounded to provide evidence of the link between the assumptions of the above-mentioned scholars and the way these findings have been interpreted and enacted by Obama and his staff. The goal is to further identify these principles by means of data-mining techniques that demonstrate the way Senator-President-Obama’s (SPO) speech is able to linguistically activate and keep sprinkled metonymies alive. Thus, analyses focus on the master narratives (Westen, 2007) that SPO realised during the period 2004–2010.