Is trope a word

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A literary trope is the use of figurative language, via word, phrase or an image, for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech.^[1] Keith and Lundburg describe a trope as, «a substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase.»^[2] The word trope has also come to be used for describing commonly recurring or overused literary and rhetorical devices,^[3][4] motifs or clichés in creative works.^[5][6] Literary tropes span almost every category of writing, such as poetry, film, plays, and video games.

Origins[edit]

The term trope derives from the Greek τρόπος (tropos), «turn, direction, way», derived from the verb τρέπειν (trepein), «to turn, to direct, to alter, to change».^[5] Tropes and their classification were an important field in classical rhetoric. The study of tropes has been taken up again in modern criticism, especially in deconstruction.^[7] Tropological criticism (not to be confused with tropological reading, a type of biblical exegesis) is the historical study of tropes, which aims to «define the dominant tropes of an epoch» and to «find those tropes in literary and non-literary texts», an interdisciplinary investigation of which Michel Foucault was an «important exemplar».^[7]

In medieval writing[edit]

A specialized use is the medieval amplification of texts from the liturgy, such as in the Kyrie Eleison (Kyrie, / magnae Deus potentia, / liberator hominis, / transgressoris mandati, / eleison). The most important example of such a trope is the Quem quaeritis?, an amplification before the Introit of the Easter Sunday service and the source for liturgical drama.^[4][8] This particular practice came to an end with the Tridentine Mass, the unification of the liturgy in 1570 promulgated by Pope Pius V.^[7]

Types and examples[edit]

Rhetoricians have analyzed a variety of «twists and turns» used in poetry and literature and have provided a list of labels for these poetic devices. These include

• Analogy — A comparison by showing how two seemingly different entities are alike, along with illustrating a larger point due to their commonalities.^[9][10][11]
• Emphasis — The use of an expression or term in a narrower and more precise sense than usual to accentuate a certain sense.^[12][13][14]
• Hyperbole – The use of exaggeration to create a strong impression.
• Irony – Creating a trope through implying the opposite of the standard meaning, such as describing a bad situation as «good times».
• Litotes – A figure of speech and form of verbal irony in which understatement is used to emphasize a point by stating a negative to further affirm a positive, often incorporating double negatives for effect.
• Metaphor – An explanation of an object or idea through juxtaposition of disparate things with a similar characteristic, such as describing a courageous person as having a «heart of a lion».
  • * Allegory – A sustained metaphor continued through whole sentences or even through a whole discourse. For example, «The ship of state has sailed through rougher storms than the tempest of these lobbyists.»
• Metonymy – A trope through proximity or correspondence. For example, referring to actions of the U.S. President as «actions of the White House».
  • Antonomasia — A kind of metonymy in which an epithet or phrase takes the place of a proper name.
  • Synecdoche – A literary device, related to metonymy and metaphor, which creates a play on words by referring to something with a related concept. For example, referring to the whole with the name of a part, such as «hired hands» for workers; a part with the name of the whole, such as «the law» for police officers; the general with the specific, such as «bread» for food; the specific with the general, such as «cat» for a lion; or an object with its substance, such as «bricks and mortar» for a building.
• Oxymoron – The use of two opposite situations or things in one sentence to prove a point.^[2]
• Pun or paronomasia — A form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words.
  • Antanaclasis – The stylistic trope of repeating a single word, but with a different meaning each time; antanaclasis is a common type of pun, and like other kinds of pun, it is often found in slogans.
• Catachresis – A metaphor that is or can be a stretch for an audience to catch on to. Catachreses can be subjective; some people may find a metaphor to be too much while others may find it perfectly reasonable.^[2]

For a longer list, see Figure of speech: Tropes.

Kenneth Burke has called metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony the «four master tropes»^[15] owing to their frequency in everyday discourse.

These tropes can be used to represent common recurring themes throughout creative works, and in a modern setting relationships and character interactions. It can also be used to denote examples of common repeating figures of speech and situations.^[16]

Whilst most of the various forms of phrasing described above are in common usage, most of the terms themselves are not, in particular antanaclasis, litotes, metonymy, synecdoche and catachresis.^{[citation needed]}

See also[edit]

• Fantasy tropes
• Invariance principle
• Literary topos
• Meme
• Motif-Index of Folk-Literature
• Scheme (linguistics)
• Stereotype
• Tropological reading
• TV Tropes

References[edit]

Citations[edit]

Sources[edit]

English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Latin tropus, from Ancient Greek τρόπος (trópos, “a manner, style, turn, way; a trope or figure of speech; a mode in music; a mode or mood in logic”), related to τροπή (tropḗ, “solstice; trope; turn”) and τρέπειν (trépein, “to turn”); compare turn of phrase. The verb is derived from the noun.

Pronunciation[edit]

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /tɹəʊp/, [tɹ̥əʊp]
• (General American) enPR: trōp, IPA^(key): /tɹoʊp/
• Rhymes: -əʊp

Noun[edit]

trope (plural tropes)

1. (art, literature) Something recurring across a genre or type of art or literature, such as the ‘mad scientist’ of horror movies or the use of the phrase ‘once upon a time’ as an introduction to fairy tales; a motif.

   • 1776, George Campbell, “Of Wit, Humour, and Ridicule”, in The Philosophy of Rhetoric. […] In Two Volumes, volume I, London: Printed for W[illiam] Strahan; and T[homas] Cadell, in the Strand; and W[illiam] Creech at Edinburgh, →OCLC, book I (The Nature and Foundations of Eloquence), pages 65–66:

     It is likewiſe witty, for […] a trope familiar to this author, you have here a compariſon of—a woman’s chaſtity to a piece of porcelain,—her honour to a gaudy robe,—her prayers to a fantaſtical diſguiſe,—her heart to a trinket; and all theſe together to her lap-dog, and that founded on one lucky circumſtance (a malicious critic would perhaps diſcern or imagine more) by which theſe things, how unlike ſoever in other reſpects, may be compared, the impreſſion they make on the mind of a fine lady.

   • 2017 February 23, Katie Rife, “The Girl With All The Gifts tries to put a fresh spin on overripe zombie clichés”, in The A.V. Club‎^[1]:

     You have to give director Colm McCarthy, a Scottish TV veteran making his feature film debut, and writer Mike Carey, adapting his own novel, credit for attempting the seemingly impossible task of doing something new with the zombie subgenre. And by blending it with the common YA [young adult] trope of a young female protagonist who leads the world into a new revolutionary era, they almost get there—largely thanks to newcomer [Sennia] Nanua, who presents her character’s grappling with complex themes of identity and original sin with a childlike guilelessness.

2. (medieval Christianity) An addition (of dialogue, song, music, etc.) to a standard element of the liturgy, serving as an embellishment.

   • 1918, Paul Studer, Le mystère d’Adam, an Anglo-Norman drama of the twelfth century‎^[2]:

     Usually known as ‘tropes,’ these interpolations consisted at first of but a few words; those of the Introit at the beginning of Mass on great festivals, however, often took the form of dialogues.

   • 1998, Peter M. Lefferts, “trope”, in Paul E. Szarmach, M. Teresa Tavormina, and Joel T. Rosenthal, editors, Medieval England: An Encyclopedia (Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages; 3), New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN; republished Abingdon, Oxon.; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2016, →ISBN, page 743, column 1:

     In the broadest sense tropes are all the later musical and textual accretions to the Franco-Roman nucleus of antiphonal and responsorial chants for mass and offices that we call Gregorian chant, a repertoire primarily fixed by the early 9th century. A trope might be a newly added textless melody (a melisma), text added to a preexistent melisma (a prosula), or newly composed text and melody added to an older item as an introduction or interpolation (a trope per se).

3. (rhetoric) A figure of speech in which words or phrases are used with a nonliteral or figurative meaning, such as a metaphor.
   • 1711, Jonathan Swift, An Excellent New Song

     Since the tories have thus disappointed my hopes,
     And will neither regard my figures nor tropes;

   • 1765, Francis Bacon, “The First Book of Francis Bacon: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human”, in The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England. In Five Volumes, volume I, London: Printed for A[ndrew] Millar, in the Strand, →OCLC, pages 14–15:

     [T]hese four cauſes concurring, the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the ſchoolmen, the exact ſtudy of languages, and the efficacy of preaching, did bring in an affected ſtudy of eloquoence, and copia of ſpeech, which then began to flouriſh. This grew ſpeedily to an exceſs; for men began to hunt more after words than matter; and more after the choiceneſs of the phraſe, and the round and clean compoſition of the ſentence, and the ſweet falling of the clauſes, and the varying and illuſtration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of ſubject, ſoundneſs of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment.

   • 1870, Thomas W[atkins] Powell, “Of Law in General”, in Analysis of American Law, Philadelphia, Pa.: J. B. Lippincott & Co., →OCLC; republished Clark, N.J.: The Lawbook Exchange, 2008, →ISBN, page 33:

     Law is the rule of human conduct. When this term is applied in reference to the governing principles of all actions, inanimate as well as animate, and arising from impulse or necessity, as well as from volition, it is used figuratively, as a trope, rather than in its true and literal signification—as when we say, the laws of motion, the laws of gravitation, the laws of vegetable or animal life.

4. (geometry) Mathematical senses.
   1. A tangent space meeting a quartic surface in a conic.

      • 1905, R[onald] W[illiam] H[enry] T[urnbull] Hudson, “The Quartic Surface”, in Kummer’s Quartic Surface, Cambridge: At the University Press, →OCLC; republished Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, →ISBN, page 15:

        Hence the section must be a conic passing through six nodes, that is, the plane touches the surface all along a conic, and is therefore a trope. The complete section of the surface by a trope is a conic counted twice; since this passes through six nodes, the trope must touch the six quadric tangent cones along generators which are tangents to the singular conic.

   2. (archaic) The reciprocal of a node on a surface.

      • 1868 November 12, [Arthur] Cayley, “VI. A Memoir on the Theory of Reciprocal Surfaces”, in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, volume 159, part I, London: Printed by Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, published 1869, →OCLC, page 202:

        I take account of conical and biplanar nodes, or, as I call them, cnicnodes, and binodes; of pinch-points on the nodal curve; and of close-points and off-points on the cuspidal curve: viz. I assume that there are
        , cnicnodes,
        , binodes,
        , pinch-points,
        , close points,
        , off-points,
        deferring for the present the explanation of these singularities. The same letters, accented, refer to the reciprocal singularities. Or using «trope» as the reciprocal term to node, these will be
        , cnictropes,
        , bitropes,
        , pinch-planes,
        , close-planes,
        , off-planes;
        but these present themselves, not in the equations above referred to, but in the reciprocal equations.

5. (music) Musical senses.
   1. A short cadence at the end of the melody in some early music.

      • 1765, Francis Bacon, “The Second Book of Francis Bacon: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human”, in The Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England. In Five Volumes, volume I, London: Printed for A[ndrew] Millar, in the Strand, →OCLC, page 53:

        Is not the trope of muſic, to avoid or ſlide from the cloſe or cadence, common with the trope of rhetoric, of deceiving expectation? Is not the delight of the quavering upon a ſtop in muſic, the ſame with the playing of light upon the water?

      • 1983, John G. Johnstone, “Beyond a Chant: ‘Tui sunt caeli’ and Its Tropes”, in Studies in the History of Music, volume 1 (Music and Language), New York, N.Y.: Broude Brothers, →ISBN, pages 24–37; reprinted in Alejandro Enrique Planchart, editor, Embellishing the Liturgy: Tropes and Polyphony, Abingdon, Oxon.; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2016, →ISBN, page 138:

        If the antiphon comes to an end with the “Praeparatio” trope, a musical difficulty is presented by the trope’s cadence. Although the antiphon is in the E-plagal mode and the first three trope elements cadence on E, this trope cadences on G, a rare cadence tone in this mode.

   2. A pair of complementary hexachords in twelve-tone technique.

      • 1963, George Perle, “Simultaneity”, in Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, Berkeley; Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, →OCLC, page 120:

        The eighty six-note segments were originally tabulated by Hauer and are the basis of his twelve-tone system. Each of [Josef Matthias] Hauer’s tropes consists of two hexachords of mutually exclusive content, so that each pair of hexachords includes all twelve tones of the semitonal scale. Only eight hexachords may be associated in this way with their own transpositions. These generate the eight tropes illustrated in examples 141 and 128. Each of the remaining seventy-two hexachords must be paired with a dissimilar hexachord in order to form a trope.

   3. (Judaism) A cantillation pattern, or one of the marks that represents it.

      • 1985, Steven M. Brown, “The Languages of Prayer”, in Stephen Garfinkel, editor, Higher and Higher: Making Jewish Prayer Part of Us, Department of Youth Activities, United Synagogue of America, →OCLC, section 3 (The Language of Music), page 45:

        The Torah was chanted in a loud and strong voice so that all could hear. This cantillation of the Torah—trope—is shown by musical notation which serves grammatical and exegetical functions, ta’amay hamikra or ta’amay n’ginah. They put down in a final form an oral tradition that had been maintained for centuries. The Ashkenazim today have six systems of cantillation, each reflective of the texts and time of chanting. For example, on Tishah B’av the tunes are sad and doleful; on Purim the trope resembles a speedy narrative; the readings of Yamim Nora’im are quite majestic, and so on.

      • 2006, Sara E. Karesh; Mitchell M. Hurvitz, “trope”, in Encyclopedia of Judaism (Encyclopedia of World Religions), New York, N.Y.: Facts On File, Infobase Publishing, →ISBN, page 526, column 1:

        The trope does not appear on the handwritten Torah scroll, but the assignment of notes for each word was fixed long ago and is accepted by Jewish communities around the world; the trope now appears in nearly every Jewish printed Bible. […] The symbols that signify the trope for the Hebrew text were introduced at the end of the 10th century of the Common Era.

6. (philosophy) Philosophical senses.
   1. (Greek philosophy) Any of the ten arguments used in skepticism to refute dogmatism.

      • 2003, Tanja Staehler, “The Historicity of Philosophy and the Role of Skepticism”, in David A. Duquette, editor, Hegel’s History of Philosophy: New Interpretations (SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies), Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, →ISBN, page 116:

        For [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel, ancient skepticism preserved the essence of the skeptical principle, and the tropes express this principle. In the earlier ten tropes, there is, according to Hegel, a lack of abstraction that becomes obvious in the fact that their diversity could be grasped under more general points of view. […] Sextus [Empiricus] explains that the first four tropes are based on the judging subject; these deal with the differences among animals, the differences among human beings, the differences that distinguish the various senses, and, finally, circumstantial differences.

   2. (metaphysics) A particular instance of a property (such as the specific redness of a rose), as contrasted with a universal.

      • 2017, Brian Garrett, What is this Thing Called Metaphysics?, 3rd edition, Abingdon, Oxon.; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, pages 55–56:

        Trope theory, though a minority view today, has been popular at various times throughout the history of philosophy, especially among medieval philosophers. Trope theory holds that properties and relations are themselves (unrepeatable) particulars. (Tropes are also called ‘abstract particulars’ – ‘abstract’ in the sense of fine, partial and diffuse, not in the sense of outside space and time.) Thus the redness of a particular billiard ball is a trope, located where the ball is and nowhere else. A different but exactly resembling billiard ball has a numerically different but exactly resembling redness trope. There is no colour property common to, or instantiated in, both balls (similarly all other properties and relations).

Usage notes[edit]

In the art or literature sense, the word trope is similar to archetype and cliché, but is not necessarily pejorative.

Derived terms[edit]

Descendants[edit]

• Japanese: トロープ (torōpu)
• Korean: 트로프 (teuropeu)

Translations[edit]

Verb[edit]

trope (third-person singular simple present tropes, present participle troping, simple past and past participle troped)

1. (transitive) To use, or embellish something with, a trope.

   • 1926, J[ames] M[idgley] Clark, “The Drama”, in The Abbey of St Gall as a Centre of Literature & Art, Cambridge: At the University Press, →ISBN, page 206:

     The motive for troping the introit was twofold. Firstly there was the desire to add colour, mystical fervour, to the restrained, matter-of-fact Roman rite. Besides this psychological reason there was a practical one. The introit was sung by the choir while the celebrants proceeded towards the altar to officiate at mass. This part of the ritual lent itself very readily to embellishment and expansion.

   • 2015, Alun Munslow, “Managing the Past”, in Patricia Genoe McLaren, Albert J. Mills, and Terrance G. Weatherbee, editors, The Routledge Companion to Management and Organizational History (Routledge Companions in Business, Management and Accounting), Abingdon, Oxon.; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 133:

     The specific outcome of that ‘story-telling’ largely derives from how managers ‘figure’ their world – how they trope or ‘figuratively turn’ meanings. So, management decision(s) making is about figurative synthesis – troping literal meaning – as much as it might be analysis.

2. (transitive) Senses relating chiefly to art or literature.
   1. To represent something figuratively or metaphorically, especially as a literary motif.

      • 1999, Heather Dubrow, “’A Doubtfull Sense of Things’: Thievery in The Faerie Queene 6.10 and 6.11”, in Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman, editors, Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (Studies in the English Renaissance), Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, →ISBN, page 204:

        «So clomb this first grand Thief into God’s Fold» (4.192), [John] Milton writes, thus troping Satan’s transgression as neither deception, seduction, nor disobedience, though he presents it in those terms elsewhere, but rather as robbery.

      • 2002, Thomas Strychacz, “’The Sort of Thing You Should Not Admit’: Ernest Hemingway’s Aesthetic of Emotional Restraint”, in Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis, editors, Boy’s Don’t Cry?: Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S., New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 151:

        It suggests that the «masculine» (or exaggeratedly masculine) style of Death in the Afternoon [by Ernest Hemingway] is not a formal or immanent attribute of the text but must be «engendered» through acts of interpretation. And it suggests that what was at stake in this «engendering» was nothing less than the preservation of powerful forms of authentic masculinity in the face of a work that, puzzlingly, seemed to trope the very notions of masculinity and modernism.

   2. To turn into, coin, or create a new trope.

      • 2009, Julie Clark Simon, “Voiceprinting: How Its Failures Speak”, in Emily Golson and Toni Glover, editors, Negotiating a Meta-pedagogy: Learning from Other Disciplines, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, →ISBN, page 50:

        I troped the World Wide Web as an especially dangerous research venue. «Don’t pick up anything unless you know where it has been,» I said.

   3. To analyse a work in terms of its literary tropes.
3. (intransitive) To think or write in terms of tropes.

   • 1988, Deborah Baker Wyrick, “Investitures: Swift and Verbal Authority”, in Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word, Chapel Hill, N.C.; London: University of North Carolina Press, →ISBN, pages 39–40:

     By acting in loco parentis, the written word performs its own usurpations of generating authority and generated meanings. Therefore, after the brothers demolish the authority of the word as written, they ar able to substitute alternative authorities: the word as spoken, the word as added, the word as troped, the word as altered, the word as hidden.

Synonyms[edit]

• tropify

Derived terms[edit]

• tropable

Translations[edit]

[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• trope on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• trope (cinema) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• trope (literature) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• trope (mathematics) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• trope (music) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• trope (philosophy) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “trope”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• trope at OneLook Dictionary Search
• John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “trope”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.
• trope in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913

Anagrams[edit]

• Perot, Petro, Porte, opter, petro, petro-, ptero-, repot, tepor, toper

French[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

• IPA^(key): /tʁɔp/

Noun[edit]

trope m (plural tropes)

1. (music, literature, linguistics) trope

Further reading[edit]

• “trope”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Latin[edit]

Noun[edit]

trope

1. vocative singular of tropus

Norwegian Bokmål[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Ancient Greek τρόπος (trópos).

Noun[edit]

trope m (definite singular tropen, indefinite plural troper, definite plural tropene)

1. tropics (usually the definite plural tropene, but trope is used in compound words)
2. a trope (in literature, rhetoric)

Derived terms[edit]

• tropeklima

References[edit]

• “trope” in The Bokmål Dictionary.
• “trope_1” in Det Norske Akademis ordbok (NAOB).
• “trope_2” in Det Norske Akademis ordbok (NAOB).

Norwegian Nynorsk[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Ancient Greek τρόπος (trópos).

Noun[edit]

trope m (definite singular tropen, indefinite plural tropar, definite plural tropane)

1. tropics (usually the definite plural tropane, but trope is used in compound words)
2. a trope (in literature, rhetoric)

Derived terms[edit]

• tropeklima

References[edit]

• “trope” in The Nynorsk Dictionary.