A classification of classics: Gestalt psychology and the tropes of rhetoric

In this paper the long-established Gestalt laws of cognitive organisation are employed as a tool to map the complex realm of rhetorical tropes, which have been organised in a number of other ways since the days of Aristotle's pioneering treatise on rhetoric. By mapping rhetorical tropes in this manner, this paper substantiates the claim that Gestalt psychology can work qua descriptive science of cognitive phenomena at large, for such a mapping provides an exemplary and extensive application of Gestalt laws within a field of investigation, i.e. rhetorical tropes, that is relevant to all forms of human communication, scientific ones included.