English Language & Literature

Our paper describes the Rhetorical 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

Linguistic annotation provides additional information asserted with a particular purpose in a document or other piece of information. It is widely used in various fields, from computing and bioinformatics, through imaging, to law and linguistics. There is also a clear distinction between what is communicated through the written/spoken natural language and how this is passed on. We are studying a new problem in linguistic annotation—annotation of classical rhetorical figures.

In this paper we survey the disciplinary status of argumentation studies and the research trends in this field. Our investigation combines the methods of a literature review and environmental scan. The latter consists in analysis of the linguistic features of journal titles, which we approach as a type of metacommunication. The purpose of such a combination of methods is to overcome the limitations of each of these survey methods, used in isolation.

Yes. I know. You've heard this before. Every generation or two, some rhetorician wants to put on a lab coat and declare rhetoric a science. Herb Simons (1978) wrote a paper with a similar title at the very beginnings of the rhetoric of science movement, and Alan Gross (1993) has weighed in as well. A hundred years before them, David J. Hill wrote a textbook entitled The Science of Rhetoric: An Introduction to the Laws of Effective Discourse, suggesting that suasion worked pretty much like gravity. We can go further back. A nineteenth century biographer of Aristotle, Anonymous, dates "the science of rhetoric" to our very disciplinary origins, to Aristotle, who founded the field on "scientific principles," in striking contrast to the loose unmethodical approach of Isocrates, who "professed to teach [rhetoric] by mere practice in the schools, as boxing and fencing might be learnt" ("Aristotle," p. 144). We've been down this road before. But. Anonymous has a point. Among the many streams in the rhetorical tradition, there are prominent, divergent courses between the impulse to understand persuasion and the impulse to achieve persuasion, and those two motives date to the very first writings in the field. 1 Aristotle and Isocrates were animated by both impulses, of course. The division is not as clean and absolute as Anonymous would have it, nor as I am adumbrating in these very brief observations. But Anonymous is clearly right that the Aristotelian approach, framed by the man who did so much to anchor the core empirical and formal enterprises that now wear the term science so comfortably-physics, biology, geology-is oriented more fully toward understanding, and, for that reason, has a higher claim on that god-term, science. Now, we all know that the various and scattered moves to propagate the colligation science of rhetoric have been somewhat less successful 1 I certainly don't mean by this that the two enterprises shaped by these impulses-rhetoric docens and rhetoric utens-do not mutually inform each other, only that they may be, and frequently are, pursued independently (or, more accurately, since it is impossible that the one does not implicate the other, that they are pursued with one heavily dominant, the other heavily subordinate).

C HOMSKY et ses doctrines linguistiques ont encore un retentissement considérable, et ce, depuis presque quarante ans. (Sa célébrité en politique est presque aussi ancienne et aussi persistante.) Déjà, son accession à la célébrité avait suscité la polémique. Depuis, nombre d'articles, voire de livres, ont traité de son apport, souvent en termes de révolution scientifique (c'est précisément le titre du chapitre 3 du présent livre) ou, au contraire, de pseudo-révolution. Pour l'histoire du mouvement chomskyen, un ouvrage fait autorité depuis une quinzaine d'années: c'est celui de Newmeyer (1980). En un sens, cette excellente histoire de la syntaxe et de la sémantique issues du chomskyisme symbolise la consécration officielle de !'«entreprise» (comme Chomsky lui-même appelle son école). En effet, tout en visant à l'impartialité et en gardant un ton très sobre, Newmeyer avait choisi son camp: celui de Chomsky. Et, en tant qu'ancien secrétaire trésorier de la Linguistic Society of America, il faisait certainement partie de l'establishment de la linguistique américaine. Ça prenait peut-être un auteur de la périphérie pour réussir à ébranler la conception établie de l'histoire du générativisme. Randy Allen Harris est canadien, et il ne se présente pas comme un linguiste pur (et dur) 1 , mais comme * Merci à Denis Bouchard pour ses commentaires sur une version préliminaire du présent compte rendu.

I argue for the importance of rhetorical schemes for understanding, diagnosing, and coping with forms of dementia. Schemes give salience (recruit attention), memorability (affect storage and facilitate retrieval), and aesthetic effects (induce a pleasurable emotional response) to configurations of language. They do so because of the way they play to neurocognitive pattern biases, like repetition, sequence, and position. Dementia is a condition under which language ability degrades, alongside memory and attention, but pattern biases appear to be comparatively robust, and schemic configurations become more and more frequent in dementia speech. Rhetorical schemes, that is, are notably resilient to the forces that diminish language use in individuals with dementia.

There is a driving need to interrogate large bodies of text for pragmatic meaning, e.g., to detect sentiment, diagnose genre, plot chains of reasoning, and so forth. But this type of meaning is often implicit, 'hidden' meaning, evoked by linguistic cues, stylistic arrangement, or argumentation structure— features that have hitherto been difficult for Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems to recognize and use. Pragmatic concerns were historically the province of rhetorical studies, and we have turned to rhetoric in order to find new solutions to computational pragmatics. This paper highlights a form of rhetorical device that encodes deep levels of pragmatic meaning and yet lends itself to automated detection. These devices are the linguistic configurations known as rhetorical figures, which have been poorly understood and vastly underutilized in Computational Linguistics and Computational Argumentation. We present an annotation scheme using XML for rhetorical figures to m...

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 knowledgeintensive 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 distinctive stylistic features despite having no fixed order in the superstructure. They hold considerable promise for computational argumentation analysis and processing, perhaps especially in scientific and technical discourses, where the need for reliable detection and summarisation is particularly high. Our investigation shows that despite the complex and interpenetrating semantic and stylistic attributes of argumentation, there are significant, computationally tractable regularities.

Note: Rhetoric has an extensive technical vocabulary. In this introduction, we explain these terms as we go along. The authors of the papers in this special issue do the same. But it can be easy to get lost in a forest of so many novel terms. So we provide a glossary at the end of this introduction.