[CTN] Fw: Rhetoricon Symposium

[Sue Ann Campbell]

There is an upcoming symposium of possible interest to CTN members. Please see below and attached.

Regards,

Sue Ann

________________________________
From: Randy Harris <raha at uwaterloo.ca>
Sent: Friday, May 22, 2026 9:36:42 PM
To: Sue Ann Campbell <sacampbell at uwaterloo.ca>
Subject: Rhetoricon Symposium


Hi Sue Ann,

Could you push this out to CTN folks, please? Britt sent something round a month or so back, but it’s happening next Thursday and Friday now, so a fresh bump is probably in order.

It’s not directly related to CTN research, though there are certainly some relevant projects, including more details on the hyperdimensional modelling of rhetorical figures that Martin Pham presented on the last research day (continuing work by Alicia Bremer, and abetted by Terry Stewart), and some other ML stuff—LLMs, chain-of-reasoning, corpus mining, ….

But the headliners are the main reason to attend. For my money, Adele Goldberg (Princeton Psychology) is the most important linguist in the world right now and Laura Michaelis (UColorado-Boulder, Linguistics) is exceptional as well, so anyone with NLP, LLM, or other linguistics-adjacent interests should want to make the best of this opportunity.  Construction Grammar, their research programme, is definitely the most influential framework in linguistics now. Jeanne Fahnestock (UMaryland Emeritus), for her part, is a major stylistics and argumentation scholar.  The symposium is around the proposed merger of rhetorical stylistics and Construction Grammar.

There is also a 20% discount code UW faculty should know about, FINCON20. Unfortunately (and against my wishes), it doesn’t work for the student rate, but that's already a low $25.

I’ve only attached the short programme, but there are clickable QR codes that supply more in-depth details (abstracts for the talks and posters, bios, that kind of thing).

Thanks!
Randy Allen Harris
Rhetoric, Linguistics, Communication Design
English Language and Literature | David Cheriton School of Computer Science
uWaterloo | Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1 | 519 888 4567 x45362 | HH 247 | @randyallenharris.bsky.social
Owlstown site<https://randyallenharris.owlstown.net>
I acknowledge that I work on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, land promised and given to Six Nations, which includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.

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