Trope

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Tropea

A 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.

Linguistic usage

Trope comes from the Greek word, tropos, which means a "turn", as in heliotrope, a flower which turns toward the sun. We can imagine a trope as a way of turning a word away from its normal meaning, or turning it into something else.

A number of tropes have been identified, among them:

metonymy as in association.
irony as in contraries.
metaphor as in comparatives.
synecdoche as in the distribution of the whole into the part.

(For a more comprehensive listing, see Figure of speech)

Literary usage

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 (i.e., asking such questions as: what trope am I working with in this poem/story?).

A wiki collecting tropes used in television is available at TV Tropes Wiki.

Tropes in 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 (1973). 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 (1953).

Tropes in music

In Jewish religious liturgy

The Old Testament is referred to by Jews as the Tanakh or the Hebrew Bible. The standard text accepted by mainstream Judaism is the Hebrew Masoretic Text. Words in the Masoretic Text contain three sections: the letters (consonants), vowel points, and cantillation marks, also called trope or te'amim in Hebrew.

It is generally believed that the Hebrew trope originally represented individual musical notes, the pitches of which are long forgotten. Over time, each trope has come to stand for a specific musical phrase. Different traditions, e.g., Persian, Yemenite, use different melodies. Also, although the written trope symbols are the same, different musical phrases are used for text in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the Haftorah, excerpts from other parts of the Tanakh, such as the book of Isaiah.

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 (complementary ones) 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.

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