This paper is an attempt to analyze a sample of 2020 American presidential election posters from the viewpoint of Cognitive Semantics (CS). The analysis covers the visual and verbal elements of these posters in terms of metaphorical and blending conceptualizations. The study also attempts to find out how these cognitive mechanisms are employed to persuade the audience and highlight the political power of the election candidates. To achieve the aims of the study, a sample of Trump and Biden’s political posters used in the 2020 American campaign is selected to be analyzed at visual and verbal levels. The visual elements are analyzed based on Forceville's (1996-2014) model of non-verbal metaphor including monomodal and multimodal pictorial metaphor. On the other hand, Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor model is adopted for the analysis of linguistic elements. In terms of conceptual blending, Fauconnier and Turner’s model is used for the analysis of both linguistic and visual elements. The results of analysis show that metaphorical and blending conceptualizations are essential tools in constructing and decoding the meaning of political election campaign posters.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate hyperbole inbook blurbs. Back cover blurbs, brief texts displayed on book covers,provide information about a book to potential readers. They aremainly evaluative- persuasive texts which summarize the mainfeatures of the book and provide a mostly subjective evaluation usinglexical, pragmatic and textual devices. One of these devices ishyperbole. Hyperbole (also referred to as exaggeration oroverstatement) has been studied in rhetoric and literary contexts, butonly relatively recently in book blurbs. This paper aims to analyze andclassify hyperbolic constructions in back cover blurbs of selectedbooks in order to identify their pragmatic functions as evaluation andpersuasion. In order to achieve the aim of the present study, thirty book blurbsof linguistics and literary books were analyzed through adopting alinguistic and pragmatic model. The findings reveal that hyperbolicconstructions are realized widely via lexical devices especiallyadjectives. Moreover, most of the hyperbolic constructions used in theselected texts fulfill certain pragmatic functions among whichevaluation and emphasis are highly frequent. Based on this, hyperboleis primarily evaluative rather than a descriptive or explanatory device.Key words: hyperbole, book blurbs, pragmatic functions