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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...