Rhetoricon Symposium: Figures & Constructions, Constructions & Figures

Taking place on Thursday, May 28 and Friday, May 29, the 2026 Rhetoricon Symposium brings together leading scholars of rhetorical stylistics, construction grammar, and computational linguistics to contribute to an approach at the intersection of figurative patterns and grammatical constructions in the context of neurocognitive exemplar models and machine learning.

This approach is one that has been pioneered at the University of Waterloo largely under the direction of Professors Randy Allen Harris and Chrysanne Di Marco (now emeritus), including two earlier workshops at Waterloo and resulting in many other disseminations, such as a special issue of Argument & Computation, a forthcoming Cambridge University Press book by Professor Harris, and a special issue of Constructions and Frames.

Host
Randy Allen Harris, University Professor, Department of English Language and Literature and David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Keynote speakers

• Adele Goldberg, M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychology, Princeton University
  Constructions do it with style: Rhetorical effects of the you-know-what-I-mean construction
• Jeanne Fahnestock, Professor Emerita, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Maryland
  Persuasive parallelism in form, sound, and strategic repetition
• Laura Michaelis, Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder
  Marked contrast: A construction that performs antithesis through prosody, conceptual blending and ironic pretense

The symposium also features talks and posters by Waterloo students and recent graduates on such topics as Chinese figuration, large language models, figure detection, natural language understanding, reasoning models, and ontology engineering.

Symposium program
View the full program and bios on the Rhetoricon website or download the Symposium program (PDF).

Tickets and registration
Register to attend the Rhetoricon Symposium.
Cost: $100 (tenured faculty), $50 (untenured faculty), $25 (students)