Construct · 3 fields · 5 citations
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In rhetoric a trope is a figure in which a word or phrase is turned away from its ordinary meaning to another, as in metaphor, metonymy, irony, or synecdoche, in contrast to a scheme, which rearranges words without altering their meaning. Quintilian's The orator's education (Institutio oratoria, ca. 95 CE) treats tropes as a distinct class of the ornaments of style, the turnings of meaning, and later handbooks such as Lanham's A handlist of rhetorical terms keep this as the governing meaning. The referent is a semantic swerve in language, catalogued and taught as part of elocutio, and it has nothing structurally in common with an insertion into a chant melody or an abstract property in metaphysics beyond the shared Greek root meaning a turn.[1][2]
In analytic metaphysics a trope is a particularised property: not a universal that many things share, but the specific, non-repeatable instance of a quality located in one object, so the redness of this apple is numerically distinct from the redness of that one. Donald C. Williams's The elements of being (originally published 1953) made the trope the basic building block of reality, arguing that objects and universals alike can be analysed as bundles and classes of such particulars. The referent is an ontological primitive in a theory of properties, a technical term of twentieth-century philosophy that happens to share the word with the rhetorician's figure and the musicologist's chant insertion while naming an entirely different construct.[3]
In medieval musicology a trope is an addition to an existing item of liturgical plainchant: new text, new melody, or both, grafted onto a chant of the Mass or Office to amplify or gloss it, a practice that flourished from roughly the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Weakland's The beginnings of troping and Crocker's The troping hypothesis debate how and why these interpolations arose and how troping relates to the sequence. The referent is a concrete compositional accretion in a chant repertory, studied through manuscripts and attributions, and it is unrelated to a figure of speech or a metaphysical particular despite carrying the same name.[4][5]
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