Figuration paroxystique

Figuration and grammaticalization

There is broad agreement among evolutionary linguists that the emergence of human language, as opposed to other primate communication systems, is characterised by two key phenomena: the use of symbols, and the use of grammatical structure (Tomasello 2003). In this paper, we show that these two defining aspects of language actually emerge from the same set of underlying cognitive mechanisms with...

Constructing a Rhetorical Figuration Ontology

Many essential components of language charted by rhetoric, the ancient study of persuasion, remain understudied and underrepresented in current Natural Language systems. Our goal is to combine linguistic and rhetorical theories with discourse analysis and machine learning to develop formal models of computational rhetoric that may be usefully applied in real-world Computational Linguistics syst...

Rhetorical Figuration as a Metric in Text Summarization

We show that surface-level markers of pragmatic intent can be used to recognize the important sentences in text and can thereby improve the performance of text summarization systems. In particular, we focus on using automated detection of rhetorical figures—characteristic syntactic patterns of persuasive language—to provide information for an additional metric to enhance the performance of the ...

Globalization, or the Vanishing Present of Postcolonialism? (and the Figuration of the Comprador-IntellectuaI)

Robert Motherwell’s Interior with Pink Nude (1951) resides in an uncertain space between figuration and abstraction

Robert Motherwell’s Interior with Pink Nude (1951) resides in an uncertain space between figuration and abstraction. While the picture is a fairly straightforward composition, the multiple layers of paint on the surface and the obvious reworking and overpainting contribute to a general spatial and figural ambiguity. The two black-and-pink forms with multiple appendages are painted on a cloudy o...