Our research project of cognitive rhetoric aims at systematically exploring a cognitive mechanism underlying the relationship between stylistic techniques of rhetoric, interpretations or meanings and its effects, and also developing a computational methodology of artistic work generation. This paper introduces the project of cognitive rhetoric and discusses its purposes and goals, related disciplines, and methodology. This paper then reviews, as case studies of cognitive rhetoric, our ongoing studies on “the cognitive mechanism of metaphor comprehension and appreciation” and “non-story type film rhetoric and its composition system”.

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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.

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This study focuses on an unresolved issue -- the role of salience-based yet incompatible interpretations in shaping contextually compatible ironic interpretations in contexts strongly benefiting such interpretations by inducing an expectation for ironic utterances. According to the direct access view (Gibbs, 1986, 1994, 2002), if context is highly predictive of an oncoming ironic utterance it will facilitate that utterance relative to an incompatible alternative. According to the graded salience hypothesis (Giora, 1997, 2003), even if irony is facilitated, this will not block salience-based interpretations -- interpretations based on the salient meanings of the utterance's components (whether literal or non-literal) -- even if contextually incompatible. Review of the findings accumulated in the literature so far show that ironies took longer to make sense of than salience-based interpretations and involved salience-based incompatible interpretations even in the presence of a strong context inducing an expectation for an ironic utterance. This was true even when contextual information was heavily biased in favor of an ironic interpretation, whether observably promoting such an expectation (Giora et al., 2007) or involving more than one contextual factor supportive of that interpretation (Pexman, Ferretti & Katz, 2000).

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Sentence-final particles imply whether a message-sender's statement succeeds its antecedent situation or the sender commits to start a new situation, and temp message-receivers to join communicative interaction with the sender. This study investigated effects of this function on message-receivers in three experiments in use of sentence-final particle “no” which maintains vague relation between the sender's present statement and its antecedent situation. In experiment 1 the effect of adding “no” on declarative sentences upon impression of the passage-writer was examined. In experiment 2 the effect of “no” upon perception of the writer's intention for interactive discourse was examined. In experiment 3 the effect of “no” upon readers' sense of involvement in the sender's discourse. The material was sentences about behavior in a day of an undergraduate girl,The materials were two versions of a diary -- like prose of a serious campus girl, one of which was composed of declarative sentences and the other was composed of every declarative sentence plus sentence-final particle “no”. The experiments showed the predicted results, that is, the writer was recognized to be less logical when she used sentences with the “no”, and the readers perceived the writer's expectation for readers' participation and sensed involvement in the writer's discourse. A message sender can influence on receivers' impression, behavior, and attitude by making selective use of sentence-final particles. In this sense, strategic use of sentence-final particles is one of rhetoric to control on building interaction with message receivers.

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The present study aims to verify whether the perception of irony occurs after pragmatic insincerity is detected from the speaker's perspective or from the listener's egocentric perspective. Under the manipulation of shared common ground (CG) between the listener who had ironic environment and the speaker, effects of cognitive load on irony comprehension were explored. In Experiment 1, participants read passage and rated the degree of perceived irony with⁄without cognitive load. In Experiment 2, participants also had to judge whether the utterance was irony or not as quickly as possible. On low-CG condition, cognitive load increased the degree of perceived irony (Experiment 1) and decreased the reaction time of irony judgment (Experiment 2). These results showed that participants didn't inhibit the unintended ironical meaning because they were unable to consider common ground under cognitive load. On high-CG condition, cognitive load affected neither the degree of perceived irony nor the reaction time of irony judgment. It was suggested that listeners initiate the processing of ironical meaning when they notice the pragmatic insincerity from their egocentric perspective, not when they recognize it from the speaker's perspective.

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The goal of this case study was to describe creation processes of contemporary artists from the perspective of Cognitive Science. We focused on the interaction among activities that affect long term processes of expertise and those that affect shorter term processes as the artist creates a series of work. We conducted retrospective interviews with two contemporary artists in their 40's using the portfolios of their past works so that they could recall their creation processes in detail. We found that the artists used an analogical modification process to produce a new series of artwork. Analogical modification is a cognitive process similar to analogical mapping, but modifies major features of the source structure while mapping it to the target. Artistic vision, which is formed through many years of creative activities and consists of main themes and goals for creation, plays an important role in guiding the usage of analogical modification. Analogical modification correspondingly appeared to deepen artistic vision.

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The purpose of this study was to directly investigate metaphor interpretation, which is thought to be diversified by the metaphor familiarity. Previous studies assessed interpretation process by investigating individual preferences for the form of the metaphor: “A is B” or “A is like B”. According to those studies, similarity is enhanced by metaphor familiarity; and the more similar the topic and the vehicle are, the more likely individuals are to prefer “A is B” over “A is like B” and vice-versa. The preference shown by the individuals indirectly predicts the metaphor's interpretation diversity. In this study, we directly examined metaphor interpretation diversity. By using multi-dimensional scaling to represent the participants' metaphor understanding, we examined the relationship between familiarity and metaphor interpretation. The results revealed that the number of familiar metaphors which were accepted as apt interpretations by the participants was larger than that of unfamiliar metaphors. In addition, while for the familiar metaphors the pattern of interpretation was similar between participants, for the unfamiliar metaphors, it was different.

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This research's goal is to develop a tool for narrative generation process that is not strongly constrained by meaning using a circular mechanism of narrative and music. Based on the idea, in this paper, first, we propose two systems that we have developed. Next, referring to mechanisms in these systems, we discuss methods and directions of the way of narrative-music circular generation and consider problems on the correspondence relations of narrative and music from the viewpoint of “Narrativity”.

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Most of the existing metaphor studies address comprehension of nominal metaphors, like “My job is a jail”, and predicative metaphors, like “He shot down all of my arguments”. However, little attention has been given to how people comprehend adjective metaphors, such as “sweet voice”. Very few studies have focused on color adjective metaphors, like “red voice” or “black mood”, in which an adjective denoting color modifies a noun designating abstract entities like emotions. However, not a few color adjective metaphors are used in our daily life as well as in literary works. Germen poetic expressions like “blaue Klage” (blue cry) or “weiße Traurigkeit” (white sadness) indicate cognitive universality. In this paper, we examine meanings of Japanese color adjective metaphors and argue that meanings of those metaphors are not predictable from those typically associated with color adjectives, and that those metaphors evoke negative images. Based on the Abstract Performance Grammar proposed by Osgood (1980), we hypothesized meaning change patterns by the interaction between source concepts expressed by color adjectives and modified target concepts expressed by head nouns. These hypotheses were tested by psychological experiments. Materials used in the experiment were collected from the Internet. Subjects were asked to evaluate meanings of linguistic expressions by 7-point semantic differential scales (from strongly negative as -3 to strongly positive as +3). Subjects were also asked to give words associated from each expression. Results suggest color adjective metaphors tend to evoke negative images.

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Although much has been discussed about argumentation in various academic fields, prior attempts to develop teaching method for argumentative skills have been inconclusive. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the process of how inexperienced students acquire argumentative skills in a community of practice, and to provide an instructional approach regarding characteristics of learners obtained by the experiments. 20 freshmen participated a four-week debate training and a series of tests. After the session, most of the 18 subordinate argumentative skills which were set for analytic schema were improved, compared with the pretest. However, skills such as “Reasonableness of grounds” “Numbering” “Labeling” were revealed difficult to learn without formal instructions. Further analysis of patterning arguments clarifies underperformance of some particular types of the participants. By discussing these results, the prospects of argumentative education for Japanese students are explored.

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The target of this research is the information system that possesses the creative know-how for the excellent commercial film in both promotion and art. This research arranges a point of view on the techniques, rhetorics and effects of commercial film, and analyzes the relation between the techniques, rhetorics and effects of commercial film (television commercial messages).
Based on the analysis of 100 television commercial messages, the rules between the effects (good impression measure, good impression elements and atmosphere elements) and the technique-rhetorics of commercial film are extracted. These rules can be used the support of commercial film production.
There are correlations between the rhetoric types of commercial film and the effects (87% of good impression elements, 77% of atmosphere elements). It is interesting that the techniques and rhetorics of commercial film (a product side point of view) have the correlations with the effects to the viewer.
The rules between the promotion effects (good impression measure and good impression elements) and the sensitive effects (atmosphere elements) can be used the production of excellent commercial film in both promotion and sense.

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Saito and Shiraishi (2002) have reported that people bind live postures together into a series of movements (the binding). They used a cued reconstruction test in which participants were presented a list of seven asymmetrical front postures sequentially presented, after which the participants were asked to reconstruct the order of the presented postures from cued postures printed on a sheet. We conducted two experiments using the cued reconstruction test to investigate the effect of the lifelike quality of postures and the processing based on an egocentric frame of reference on the activation of the binding. We used symmetrical front and back postures with less lifelike quality depicted with three dimensional computer graphics. We manipulated the number of postures (eight postures in Experiment 1, nine and eleven postures in Experiment 2) in the lists of stimuli and the number of joints (1- and 4-step conditions) functioning in the changes in the neighboring postures to vary the difficulty of task both in Experiment 1 and 2. The still pictures of front and back postures were used in Experiment 1, and the still pictures and the animation of back postures were used in Experiment 2. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that the accuracy in the 1 step condition with back postures was higher than the 4 step condition, but not in the front condition. The results of Experiment 2 showed that the accuracy in the still condition with back postures decreased as the number of postures increased from nine to eleven, but not in the animation condition. These results suggest that the decrease in lifelike quality interrupts the activation of the binding with front postures when only observing them without imitation, whereas the observation of back postures elicits the binding due to the ease in using the processing based on an egocentric frame of reference. Furthermore, the observation of sequentially presented postures is involved in forming a motor representation of neighboring postures, whereas the resulting motor representation is different from such motion representation as that shown in the animation.

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This study investigated the creative expertise of artists who had been making art for many years. In an initial study, we interviewed four artists at different stages of their careers about their previous artworks to investigate how they made them and how they changed in the course of their making. We asked, for instance, about their concept of each artwork, when and how a new series of artworks emerged, and so on. It was revealed that experienced artists formed their artistic vision (i.e., their long-term intention or main theme related to making art) after changing series of artwork several times, and then created artworks based on it. On the other hand, younger artists did not recognize their artistic vision yet, making artworks based on their temporary interests. In a second study, nine professional artists with more than 10 years of experience were interviewed about their whole body of artworks to identify how they became creative experts and how their artistic vision was formed. As a result, it appeared that there are three periods in creative expertise: the first is “being constrained to external criteria”; the second is “forming their own internal criteria”; and the third is “generating harmonious creations with the artistic vision.” In sum, when the artists were young, they made artworks based on external criteria. Later on, they recognized the limitations of this approach, and started to focus on internal criteria. Finally, on average about 13 years after beginning their artistic careers and creating several series of artworks, artists formed a personal artistic vision. At that point they were confidently able to make original artworks.

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