My areas of interest include English linguistics, rhetoric, and cognitive science.
My work can be characterized as linguistic when it focuses
on the ordered properties that comprise
typical modes of expression in speaking and writing. My work can be characterized as rhetorical when it focuses on
strategic communication in specific situations and contexts. My work can be characterized as cognitive science when it treats expression and strategic communication as part of a general suite of capacities for representing aspects of physical, mental, and social reality.
The brand name for this kind of research is Cognitive Rhetoric.
Ongoing Research Projects in Cognitive Rhetoric
Attention to Meaning
I am developing a model of human attention as the cognitive basis of consciousness, discourse, and grammar. This model of human attention consists of three systems: the signal system, the selection system, and the intersubjective system. Eight elements are distributed throughout these systems.
The elements of the signal system include altering and orienting of attention.
The elements of the selection system include selecting, sustaining, and oscillating of attention.
The elements of the intersubjective system include sharing, harmonizing, and controlling of attention.
Click on Elements of Attention to download draft chapters from this book length study.
The Rhetorical Mind
What does it mean to say that Homo sapiens are "rhetorical beings"? This project seeks to address this basic question by answering five related questions:
What is cognitive about rhetoric?
What is rhetorical about cognition?
What elements of cognition permit human beings to create a social ontology?
What can the cognitive sciences tell us about our the nature of these semiotic systems?
How can the humanities guide the cognitive sciences in really understanding human thought and action?
The provocative claim that I ask both cognitive scientists and rhetoricians to entertain is that Culture itself is a result of a specific phylogenic and ontogenetic story.
The story told is one of biological and social processes converging to create a new species, Homo Rhetoricus. This claim is based on the additional claim that cultures are products of cognition and, more controversially, that hominid cultures cause language to emerge rather than language causing cultures to emerge. Symbols and "webs of symbols" by themselves are not what turned Homo sapiens into H. rhetoricus. What turned us into rhetorical agents are conscious experiences in perception and action, joint attention, episodic memory, mental imagery, metacognition, pretense, and empathy--all processes facilitated by greater executive control over body movement and expression, leading to greater interest in other minds. Our capacity for mimesis (see Donald)--for representing experiences and states-of-affairs in iconic and indexical formats under strict bodily control--molds later symbolic thought and action. Under this view, Culture is not the initial product of language, language is the product of a particular manifestation of Mimetic Culture that eventually gives rise to Rhetorical Culture, or cultures defined by symbolic action and social ontology.
This project begins with two radical premises.First, the most interesting things about cognition happen outside our heads and between "minds." Second, the most interesting things about rhetorical practices are shaped by facets of reality outside discourse.
In short, this project is neither cognitivist (i.e., it's all inside the head) nor social constructionist (i.e., it's all discourse). Neither classical cognitivism nor radical social constructionism offer compelling accounts of the unique capacities human beings as, in the words of Kenneth Burke, "symbol-making, symbol-using, and symbol-misusing animal[s]."
Experience By Design: How and Why Writers Make Specific Rhetorical Choices
With David Kaufer, Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, I am starting a project whose purpose is to addresses two methodological challenges facing researchers in text linguistics and genre theory (composition studies).
The first challenge relates to selection bias, as text linguists' sampling methods tend to be subject to the whims and caprices of their own interests instead of focusing on samples that are representative of a specific genre.The second challenge relates to granularity of analysis. It is not always clear what facet of meaning construction text linguists and genre theorists are trying to model at any given time. As a result, analyses tend to slip without warning from genre concerns to lexical and grammatical ones.
Our approach is to combine qualitative (mental spaces and blending theory) and quantitative (factor analysis) methods and approaches to text interpretation as a fruitful way of addressing these two challenges. Using the text parsing program, DocuScope, we are able to build statistical profiles of whole collections of texts. This process allows us to pick out from the corpus those exemplar texts that score highest for a particular factor (a set of variables of specific “language action types” that are either highly active or highly inactive relative to the rest of the corpus) and use them to identify text samples representative of the genre type. Once we settle on appropriate sampling, we then can proceed to conduct deep interpretation of individual texts at three distinct layers of analysis: the genre layer; the artifact layer; and the grammar layer. The result will constitute a new model of rhetorical analysis that allows text linguists and genre theorists to see in detail how individual grammatical choices operate within their discursive environments.
