Introduction -- The Orator -- Multimodal Indicators of Persuasion in Political Interviews -- Towards a Political Action -- An Ethnographic Investigation into Gender and Language in the Northern Ireland Assembly -- Intonation in Political Speech: Ségolène Royal vs. Nicolas Sarkozy -- A Diachronic Analysis of Face-to-Face Discussions: Berlusconi, from 1994 to 2010 -- The Audience -- Counterfactual Communication in Politics: Features and Effects on Voters -- The New Release of CORPS:
 a Corpus of Political Speeches Annotated with Audience Reactions -- Multimodal Behaviour and Interlocutor Identification in Political Debates -- Political Leaders’ Communicative Style and Audience Evaluation in an Italian General Election Debate -- The Discourse: Contents -- Sometimes I, Sometimes Me: A Study on the Use of Autobiographical Memories in Two Political Speeches by Barack Obama -- Communicating Politics. A Study on the Representations of the 2008 Electoral Campaign in the Italian Daily Press -- Certain-Uncertain, True-False, Good-Evil in Italian Political Speeches -- Discrediting Body. A Multimodal Strategy to Spoil the Other’s Image -- Racism and Immigration in Social Advertisings Promoted by Italian Government and Non-governmental Institutions -- The Discourse: Structures -- Politolinguistics. Towards a New Analysis of Political Discourse -- Linguistic Factors in Political Speech -- Fallacies as Argumentative Devices in Political Debates -- Sprinkled Metonymies in the Analysis of Political Discourse with Corpus Linguistics Techniques: a Case Study.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International Workshop on Multimodal Communication in Political Speech: Shaping Minds and Social Actions, held in Rome, Italy, during November 10-12, 2010. The 16 regular papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions and presented with three key-notes. The purpose of the Political Speech workshops is to provide a forum for discussing research areas of persuasive agents and social signal processing. This book covers topics on multimodal aspects of political communication, including persuasion, fallacies, racist discourse, as well as music, autobiographic memories, metonymies, dominant postures, rhetorical strategies, interruptions, intonation, and voice appeal.