Randy Allen Harris

Doing Things with Words

This chapter explores conversational maxims, dialogue acts, and the over-arching notion of register. Register is a specific variety of language, which draws on the main language for much of its resources, but which has its own characteristic structures and vocabulary, shaped by three factors—field, tenor, and mode. The field of a register is the body of activities it contains activities that map very tightly onto the dialogue acts. The tenor of a register is the collection of available dialogue roles that it includes information seeker and information provider. The mode of a register is the medium through which its dialogue acts travel (text, speech, gesture, pictograms). Register also influences the manner maxims very strongly. In particular, notions of clarity, directness, specificity, brevity, and orderliness are all determined by the communicative resources of the register.

Toward an ontology of rhetorical figures

Our paper describes the Rhetorical Figure Ontology Project, a multidisciplinary research project that is presently working towards the development of a comprehensive database of rhetorical figures, an associated wiki, and, ultimately, an ontology of rhetorical figures. The database and wiki project provide the dataset and space for the conceptual development, respectively, to create an ontology. We define an ontology as a formalized taxonomy or system of classification of concepts and associated descriptions of said concepts. Here we provide an overview of the present state of the project and a discussion of the development of ontological descriptions of rhetorical figures. This work is a joint venture between Dr. Randy Allen Harris (English) and Dr. Chrysanne DiMarco (Computer Science, and English) at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Linguistic guidelines for graphic interfaces

The author notes the unique needs of the graphic interface and the demands these needs make on the technical writer. Ten principles to help cope with writing for the graphic interface are presented, with emphasis on lexical, syntactic, and display issues. The principles are: (1) avoid verbal shortcuts; (2) keep the words simple and direct; (3) keep the syntax simple and direct; (4) keep the punctuation simple and direct; (5) keep the layout simple and direct; (6) keep the writing brief; (7) keep all dialogue and window text self-contained; (8) be absolutely consistent; (9) revise; and (10) always keep the user firmly in mind. >

Argumentative meanings and their stylistic configurations in clinical research publications

The paper reports on the results of an exploratory study into the topical organisation and stylistic features of argumentation in a corpus of ophthalmic clinical research papers. The study responds to the need for systematised and generalisable argumentation models in knowledge-intensive fields. We present here a schematised superstructure of the arguments from the corpus, charting the configurations of stylistic features, which signal the elements of this superstructure, epistemic topoi. We pay special attention to the role of lexical categories (or semantic fields) in the configurations, to the relations between the fields, and to their interactions with other elements of the configurations, including semantic, grammatical, syntagmatic, deictic, and coreferential features. Epistemic topoi are a promising discourse constituent in argumentation because, as we found, they are distinct from syntagmatic units, such as phrases, clauses, or argumentative zones, and because they are signalled with substantially...

Rhetorical figures, arguments, computation

Then he went about his regular, non-Twitter affairs. The next afternoon, fresh from a nap, he checked his account, stared at the outcome, and tweeted to @upulieto, an associate, “I just woke up. What a mess” [49]. His tweet had spiraled virally: tens of thousands of likes, retweets, endless streams of commentary. Why? Well, lots of factors, of course. There is rarely a single factor to which one can point in rapid cultural propagation. But the pithiness of the tweet, its form/function iconicity, and its argumentative force are surely three of those factors – perhaps the three most important – and all of them are a direct consequence of the tweet’s rhetorical figures. Its figures notably capitalize on repetition, a stylistic move one might think is anathema to twitter. Repetitions are highly redundant, contributing very little new information. They should therefore be corrosive to the concision so necessary to effective tweets. Repetitions distend the ideational function, not condense it, making them very costly in twitter, which provides only a 140-character vehicle. And yet: the tweet was instantly and broadly recognized as a brilliant, incisive, necessarily brief and highly effective argument. Most notable among its figuration is the compound figure, symploce, in which the same word or words are repeated at the beginnings and endings of proximal clauses or phrases (Women in and wearing hijab). Symploce is a compound figure because it is a combination of epanaphora (phraseor clause-initial

Alan Gross and the Rhetoric of Science

This article reviews the recent work of Alan G. Gross (individually, and in collaboration with Joseph Harmon and Michael Reidy), with prominent notice, as well, of works by Leah Ceccarelli, Celeste Condit, and Jeanne Fahnestock, among others, in order to sketch out developments in the rhetoric of science.

Tropical Truth(s): The Epistemology of Metaphor and other Tropes

temporal event, in exactly the way Locke identifies. The metaphor is dormant-untoliterality. What else would we say? The terminology of time is so deeply penetrated by the terminology of commerce that something like ‘‘I experienced the weekend . . .’’ sounds affected, and something like ‘‘I passed the weekend . . .’’ evokes another analogic frame. But it is a metaphor. The general phenomenon of commerce-talk about time, however, is not a metaphor; it is an analogy. ‘‘Conceptual metonymy’’ has the same problems, as does the 474 Book Reviews

Cognitive Allegory: An Introduction

This introduction situates the project of Cognitive Allegory, beginning with an overview of the reading-and-writing practice of allegoresis and the cluster of rhetorical, literary and speech genres that can be classed as allegory. The study of figuration, a concern of literary critics, rhetoricians, philosophers of language, cognitive linguists and psychologists has, since the advent of Lakoff and Johnsons Metaphors We Live By (1980) been dominated by metaphor. Harris and Tolmie, and the essayists in this special issue, drawn from diverse fields, make the case for allegory as a network of genres that draws on the cognitive resources of analogy plus narrative—through devices like personification and topification, and extension of analogic frames like “LIFE IS A JOURNEY”—making it even richer for study. Cognitive psychologist Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., explores the allegorical impulse in everyday speech; philosopher Paul Thagard advances a multiconstraint theory of analogy and applies it to Orwells Animal Farm; and in two collaborative papers, literary critics Madeleine Kasten and Curtis Gruenler compare Langlands Piers Plowman and Voltaires Candide, and rhetoricians Todd Oakley and Peter Crisp compare Pilgrims Progress and the digital video Third Race at the Honeymoon is Over Downs, deploying the resources of Fauconnier and Turners conceptual blending theory.

A Review of: The Rhetorical Power of Popular Culture: Considering Mediated Texts, by Deanna D. Sellnow

tion; the corpuscular theories of Descartes, Huygens, and others were attempts to avoid such associations. Stark is instead interested in the demonic and spiritual associations of the occult as motivation for the language reform polemics of the seventeenth century. What readers of this book will find is a review of these complaints, pursued in primary and secondary sources, and these complaints demonstrate, as Stark says in his introduction, how ‘‘entangled’’ discussions of rhetoric were in the century’s controversies (4). In his pursuit of rhetoric’s importance in debates touching on magic and witchcraft, and in arguing for the large scale shift that he identifies from a numinous to a disciplined language sensibility, explication of literary works takes up considerable space and reveals the direction of his interests. Readers will find extensive accounts of passages in Shakespeare, Spencer, Herbert, Milton, and many other late sixteenthand seventeenth-century poets and dramatists and praise for the ‘‘enacting’’ power of their language. Triggering readers’ valorizations of these works is certainly Stark’s intermediate goal in pursuit of his overall goal of restoring an appreciation of, if not a belief in, the spiritual dimensions of language.

Foreword to “Rudiments of Cognitive Rhetoric”

This long overdue translation of Dan Sperber’s 1975 paper, ‘‘Rudiments de rhétorique cognitive,’’ beyond its sheer quality of thought, is important for three specific reasons. One is simple priority. The second is the scope of Sperber’s project. The third is its treatment of figuration. The phrase cognitive rhetoric has been used in at least four ways over the last several decades. Sperber’s is the earliest, but also the least known in the Anglo-American ambit. The most familiar of the remaining three, especially to rhetoric-and-composition scholars, comes out of the work of Linda Flower and her colleagues (especially psychologist John Hayes), work that contributed to the shift of focus in writing instruction away from the products of writing and toward the processes of writing. Flower sees the fundamental move of this research as the recognition ‘‘that cognitive processes do not exist in the abstract,’’ that they exist rather in the planning and execution of activities, like writing; and she sees the chief result of this research to be an account of ‘‘how writing is influenced not only by the structure of the task but also by the way individual writers represent the task to themselves, by social rules, by the ongoing interaction of people involved, and by the wider social and cultural milieu’’ (Long and Flower 1996, 108; see also Flower 1993, 1994). For clarity of reference, I will refer to this development hereafter as cognitive writing theory. The other familiar usage, especially to rhetoric-and-literature scholars, comes out of Mark Turner’s adaptation of cognitive linguistics to the study of literature (e.g., Turner 1991; 1996; 1998). It builds on the foundational research into conceptual metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980; see especially Lakoff and Turner 1989). Literary critics who have taken up Turner’s work tend quietly, and appropriately, to call the framework cognitive poetics (e.g., Stockwell 2002, 8; Gavins and Steen 2003, 5; see Gavins and Steen 2003, 1–12 for an overview), a usage I will adopt here. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37:357–359, 2007 Copyright # The Rhetoric Society of America ISSN: 0277-3945 print=1930-322X online DOI: 10.1080/02773940601173071