TROPE
-
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 proxomity or correspondence, for example refering to actions of the US President as actions of the White House.
- irony - creating a tropes 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 disperate things with a similar characteristic
- synecdoche - related to metonymy and metaphor, creates a play on words by refering to whole with name of a part part, like the phrase "hired hands"
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.[citation needed] 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.
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).
Music
In Jewish religious liturgy
-
In Jewish liturgy, tropes are musical phrase contours (cantillations) 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 (the books that largely overlap with what is referred to by Christians as "the Old Testament"). Within any regional tradition, there are different trope for Torah (first five books of the Bible), versus Haftorah (Neve'im or "Prophets" (e.g Isaiah)), 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 (consonants), 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 tropeis 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.
See also
|