Randy Allen Harris
Biographic Data
| ID | 740032 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Randy Allen Harris |
| GIVEN NAMES | Randy Allen |
| FAMILY NAME | Harris |
| SIGNATURE | HARRIS R A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Waterloo |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9324-1879 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Rhetorical Figures, Grammatical Constructions, and Form/Meaning Alliances in Pretrained Language Models
Rhetorical schemes and Construction Grammar: The argument from chiasmus
Formal rhetorical figures (schemes) have been largely neglected by Construction Grammar (CxG). The losses of this omission are substantial. Like metaphors, schemes leverage general-purpose neurocognitive principles and evoke communicative functions. They give utterances salience and memorability, making them highly compatible with usage-based models, and they align form with function. Their association with ludic functions also makes them of cons…
A fool for rhythm: The iconicity of parallelism
Isocolon is a special form of repetition, aligning sequences of words, phrases, or clauses through prosodic parallelism. It is the mainstay of poetry and ritualistic genres, a feature of oratory, ubiquitous in slogans, proverbs, and other widespread, culturally robust expressions, and a crucial instrument of conversational coordination. It very frequently collocates with other figures and has a special affinity for parison (syntactic parallelism)…
Battle in the mind fields by John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks
Reviewed by: Battle in the mind fields by John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks Randy Harris Battle in the mind fields. By John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xix, 725. ISBN 9780226550800. $45 (Hb). Kenneth Burke, the great rhetorician, literary critic, sociologist, grammatologist, and one of the very few major theorists of language in the period they cover who doesn't appear in this brilliant new inte…
Dementia, Rhetorical Schemes, and Cognitive Resilience
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 un…
Ploke
Ploke, the scheme of perfect lexical repetition, is utterly fundamental to language and thought. If that sounds like someone talking about metaphor, it is because ploke is to schemes as metaphor is to tropes. Like metaphor, ploke is the linguistic reflex of a neurocognitive pattern bias (repetition to metaphor's similitude). Like metaphor, ploke is not a single figure but many (epanaphora, epiphora and epizeuxis, for instance, to metaphor's perso…
Stasis Salience and the Enthymemic Thesis
The argumentative stasis theory and enthymeme principles richly complement each other but they have rarely been investigated jointly. We correct this oversight first with a principled re-analysis of the stasis tradition, resulting in a double-layer stasis system: Cicero's later system (in De Oratore and Topica) with "action" stasis' subclassification, modified by Kenneth Burke's dramatic pentad of act, scene, agent, agency, purpose (in A Grammar …
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 Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980 Lakoff, G. a…
Tropical Truth(s): The Epistemology of Metaphor and other Tropes
Armin Burkhardt and Brigitte Nerlich, eds., Tropical Truth(s): The Epistemology of Metaphor and other Tropes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), vi+427pp. $140.00 (cloth). Available to institutions in a bu
Roy Harris , The semantics of science
Roy Harris , The semantics of science . London: Continuum International, 2005. Pp. xvi, 240. Hb $149.00, Pb $49.00 At least back to The language myth (1981), Roy Harris (not related to this reviewer) has plied variations of the same salvationist argument, in his customarily grumpy and entertaining style. If you're familiar with this argument, leap ahead to the third paragraph; if not, a quick synopsis, both of the errors he wants to save us from …
The emergence of semantics in four linguistic traditions: Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic. Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science, Series III-Studies in the history of the l…
The Linguistics Wars
The origin and developmemt of generative semantics
Against the background of the controversial and polarized work of Frederick Newmeyer and Robin Tolmach Lakoff, this paper chronicles the early development of generative semantics, an internal movement within the transformational model of Chomsky'sAspects of the Theory of Syntax. The first suggestions toward the movement, whose cornerstone was the obliteration of the syntax-semantics boundary, were by George Lakoff in 1963. But it was the work con…
The origin and developmemt of generative semantics
Against the background of the controversial and polarized work of Frederick Newmeyer and Robin Tolmach Lakoff, this paper chronicles the early development of generative semantics, an internal movement within the transformational model of Chomsky'sAspects of the Theory of Syntax. The first suggestions toward the movement, whose cornerstone was the obliteration of the syntax-semantics boundary, were by George Lakoff in 1963. But it was the work con…
Tropical Truth(s): The Epistemology of Metaphor and other Tropes
Armin Burkhardt and Brigitte Nerlich, eds., Tropical Truth(s): The Epistemology of Metaphor and other Tropes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), vi+427pp. $140.00 (cloth). Available to institutions in a bu
The Linguistics Wars
The origin and developmemt of generative semantics
Against the background of the controversial and polarized work of Frederick Newmeyer and Robin Tolmach Lakoff, this paper chronicles the early development of generative semantics, an internal movement within the transformational model of Chomsky'sAspects of the Theory of Syntax. The first suggestions toward the movement, whose cornerstone was the obliteration of the syntax-semantics boundary, were by George Lakoff in 1963. But it was the work con…
The Linguistics Wars
The emergence of semantics in four linguistic traditions: Hebrew, Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic. Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science, Series III-Studies in the history of the l…
Roy Harris , The semantics of science
Roy Harris , The semantics of science . London: Continuum International, 2005. Pp. xvi, 240. Hb $149.00, Pb $49.00 At least back to The language myth (1981), Roy Harris (not related to this reviewer) has plied variations of the same salvationist argument, in his customarily grumpy and entertaining style. If you're familiar with this argument, leap ahead to the third paragraph; if not, a quick synopsis, both of the errors he wants to save us from …
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 Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980 Lakoff, G. a…
Tropical Truth(s): The Epistemology of Metaphor and other Tropes
Armin Burkhardt and Brigitte Nerlich, eds., Tropical Truth(s): The Epistemology of Metaphor and other Tropes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), vi+427pp. $140.00 (cloth). Available to institutions in a bu
Stasis Salience and the Enthymemic Thesis
The argumentative stasis theory and enthymeme principles richly complement each other but they have rarely been investigated jointly. We correct this oversight first with a principled re-analysis of the stasis tradition, resulting in a double-layer stasis system: Cicero's later system (in De Oratore and Topica) with "action" stasis' subclassification, modified by Kenneth Burke's dramatic pentad of act, scene, agent, agency, purpose (in A Grammar …
Dementia, Rhetorical Schemes, and Cognitive Resilience
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 un…
Ploke
Ploke, the scheme of perfect lexical repetition, is utterly fundamental to language and thought. If that sounds like someone talking about metaphor, it is because ploke is to schemes as metaphor is to tropes. Like metaphor, ploke is the linguistic reflex of a neurocognitive pattern bias (repetition to metaphor's similitude). Like metaphor, ploke is not a single figure but many (epanaphora, epiphora and epizeuxis, for instance, to metaphor's perso…
Battle in the mind fields by John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks
Reviewed by: Battle in the mind fields by John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks Randy Harris Battle in the mind fields. By John A. Goldsmith and Bernard Laks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. xix, 725. ISBN 9780226550800. $45 (Hb). Kenneth Burke, the great rhetorician, literary critic, sociologist, grammatologist, and one of the very few major theorists of language in the period they cover who doesn't appear in this brilliant new inte…
Rhetorical Figures, Grammatical Constructions, and Form/Meaning Alliances in Pretrained Language Models
Rhetorical schemes and Construction Grammar: The argument from chiasmus
Formal rhetorical figures (schemes) have been largely neglected by Construction Grammar (CxG). The losses of this omission are substantial. Like metaphors, schemes leverage general-purpose neurocognitive principles and evoke communicative functions. They give utterances salience and memorability, making them highly compatible with usage-based models, and they align form with function. Their association with ludic functions also makes them of cons…
A fool for rhythm: The iconicity of parallelism
Isocolon is a special form of repetition, aligning sequences of words, phrases, or clauses through prosodic parallelism. It is the mainstay of poetry and ritualistic genres, a feature of oratory, ubiquitous in slogans, proverbs, and other widespread, culturally robust expressions, and a crucial instrument of conversational coordination. It very frequently collocates with other figures and has a special affinity for parison (syntactic parallelism)…
Linguistics (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Rhetorical question (5 works) · History (4 works) · Rhetorical device (4 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (4 works) · Art (3 works) · Cognition (3 works)