Born as a technique of persuasio, rhetoric has been organized according to five canons in Latin rhetoric. These canons were subsequently reduced down to onlyelocutio, due to various factors such as the invention of typography where the written text replaced the verbal text as the object of elocutio. Elocutio itself was later gradually reduced to kinds of tropes, then to tropes pairings of metaphor and metonymy, and finally to the metaphor. In spite of its declared demise at the end of the 19th century, rhetoric was revived after the latter half of the 20th century by structural linguistics, and modern rhetoric continues to transform in close contact with poetics and semiotics. Among neo-rhetorical researches on the figures, Groupe μ's approach seems to provide one of the most elaborate models. The model regards figures as a system of metaboly, where four simple operations are executed on a text at various elemental levels. The aim of this article is to reinvestigate the whole system of rhetoric from a cognitive viewpoint by presenting not only rhetorical resources -- specifically the figure system of Latin rhetoric (Cicero and Quintilianus) and French classical rhetoric (Dumarsais and Fontanier) which is the legitimate heir to the former -- but also Groupe μ's several productions which have yet to be introduced to academic research apart from Rhétorique générale.
