Encyclopedia
The term
trope has a number of meanings that cover the fields of linguistics,
literature,
philosophy,
sociology, and
music.
Linguistics
In linguistics, trope is a
rhetorical figure of speech that consists of a play on words, i.e., using a word in a way other than what is considered its literal or normal form. The other major category of figures of speech is the scheme, which involves changing the
pattern of words in a sentence.
Trope comes from the Greek word,
tropos, which means a "turn". We can imagine a trope as a way of turning a word away from its normal meaning, or turning it into something else.
Examples
- metonymy - a trope through proximity or correspondence, for example referring to actions of the US President as actions of the White House.
- irony - creating a trope through implying the opposite of the standard meaning, such as describing poverty as good times.
- metaphor - an explanation of an object or idea through juxaposition of disparate things with a similar characteristic, such as describing a courageous person as having a "heart of oak."
- synecdoche - related to metonymy and metaphor, creates a play on words by referring to the whole with the name of a part, such as "hired hands" for "workers;" referring to a part with the name of the whole, such as "the law" for "police officer;" referring to the general with the specific, such as "bread" for "food;" referring to the specific with the general, such as "cat" for "lion;" or referring to an object with the material it is made from, such as "bricks and mortar" for "buildings."
Literature
In literature, a trope is a familiar and repeated symbol, meme, theme, motif, style, character or thing that permeates a particular type of literature. They are usually tied heavily to
genre. For example, tropes in horror literature and film include the mad scientist or a dark and stormy night. Tropes can also be plots or events, such as the
science fiction trope of an alien invasion that is deterred at the last minute.
Authors that rely on tropes as the starting points for their writing are often seen as unimaginative and dull. However, many authors have twisted tropes into new forms to great success.
Stephen King has been noteworthy for taking older horror tropes and reworking them into the modern world to great effect. Tropes may also serve as guides for writers trying to strengthen the overall effectiveness of their work .
A wiki collecting tropes used in television is available at .
Philosophy
In philosophy of history
The use of tropes has been extended from a linguistic usage to the field of philosophy of history by, among other theoricists, Hayden White in his
Metahistory . Tropes are generally understood to be styles of discourse - rather than figures of style - underlying the historian's writing of history. They are historically determined in as much as the historiography of every period is defined by a specific type of trope.
For Hayden White, tropes historically unfolded in this sequence: metonymy, metaphor, synecdoche and, finally,
irony.
Trope theory in metaphysics
Trope theory in metaphysics is a flavor of nominalism. Here, a trope is a particular instance of a property, like the specific redness of a rose. This use of the term goes back to D. C. Williams .
Music
In Jewish religious liturgy
In Jewish liturgy, tropes are musical phrase contours which are applied to the words of a sacred text during public readings. It also refers to the markings in some copies of those text to indicate the vocalization.
It is not known whether trope developed from a single form used in the ancient Temple. Following the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Jews, diverse trope systems have developed regionally. As Jews continue to move about the world, it is possible to hear these variants in the same
synagogue by different readers.
Different trope apply to different parts of
Tanakh . Within any regional tradition, there are different trope for Torah , versus Haftorah , or various "megillot" or scrolls used on particular occaisions, such as the reading of Esther at
Purim.
Within Judaism, the standard accepted text of
Tanakh is the Hebrew
Masoretic Text. Words in the Masoretic Text contain three sections: the letters , vowel points, and trope. These
cantillation marks are called
te'amim in Hebrew, and the markings are standard, even though the pitch contours they represent to the reader may differ.
The trope are not random strings but follow a set and describable grammar. For more information, refer to [Jacobson, Joshua. Chanting the Hebrew Bible: the art of cantillation. 2002.]
In Medieval music
In the
Medieval era,
troping was an important compositional technique. There were two basic types of tropes: textual and musical. A textual trope involved the assigning of a new text to an existing musical melisma. A musical trope was the insertion of new notes into a piece of music, creating or extending a melisma.
In 20th-century music
In serial music, a trope is an unordered collection of six different pitches, what is now called an unordered hexachord, of which there are two in twelve tone equal temperament. Tropes were used by Josef Matthias Hauer in his
twelve-tone technique developed simultaneously but overshadowed by
Arnold Schoenberg's.
See also
