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Tropos Schematica
Tropes number in the hundreds. There are tropes so specific, it is likely a mature professional writer has only used a particular trope once or twice in a lifetime of sentence making. Symploce, for instance, (beginning a series of sentences all with the same word and then ending them all with another repeated word) is not likely to occur more than once or twice in all of Dickens's novels or Trollope's or John D. MacDonald's. Still, it's there, a full-fledged trope with a clear definition and the promise of a useful perch in the linguasphere. (Dogs like to go out. Dogs, after eating, like to go out. Dogs, after eating and drinking a pan of water, really like to go out.) It's cousins, anaphora (several sentences with the same first word) and epistrophy ( sentences with the same word at the end) are more common, but not nearly as common as familiar garden-variety tropes like metaphor or alliteration.
Metaphor, in fact, is so common that some linguists argue that it is the force that drives all language formation. Others, like the 16th Century French logician and rhetorician Petrus Ramus and the 17th Century Italian historian philosopher Giambattista Vico made an early case for isolating metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony as the four winds that blow life into language. How this works is perhaps of some interest here.
These are the big two: Metaphor and Metonymy, the voltaic titans of language who divide the world of rhetoric between them. There is a third titan, irony, but it is a negative god that inhabits a parallel universe, an underworld that spins out a sort of rhetorical anti-matter which stands like a fun-house mirror image opposed to the bright world of Metaphor and Metonymy.
Define, Jakobson.
Then there is the pantheon of classical tropes.
Personification: which we will call prosopopiea hereafter for solid, scholarly reasons.
Assonance, consonance, and alliteration: which are mostly surface as poetic terms, but are valuable here as elements of prose style.
Hyperbole: I can not exaggerate too much its role in prose composition.
Simile and Synecdoche: These are specific cases of Metaphor and Metonomy respectively, and happen a lot is refined prose.
Amtithesis: A broad umbrella category which includes a fractious brood of rhetorical fingerlings like Oxymoron, epanilepsis, chiasmus, and epanados.
That was the varsity team. Then there is a junior varsity team of minor deities who swarm the page looking for a moment in the sun. They are exclusively Greek, a least in name. But they are found in languages around the world were they have been doing their narrow-bore artisanal work for centuries oblivious to the fact that the Greeks had a name for them.
Here we have:
Zeugma
Antimetabole
Anphora
Ellipsis
Epanilepsis
Enallage
Enthymeme
Polysyndeton
Antanaclasis
Aposiopesis
Asyndeton
Etc.
Tropos Schematica
Tropes number in the hundreds. There are tropes so specific, it is likely a mature professional writer has only used a particular trope once or twice in a lifetime of sentence making. Symploce, for instance, (beginning a series of sentences all with the same word and then ending them all with another repeated word) is not likely to occur more than once or twice in all of Dickens's novels or Trollope's or John D. MacDonald's. Still, it's there, a full-fledged trope with a clear definition and the promise of a useful perch in the linguasphere. (Dogs like to go out. Dogs, after eating, like to go out. Dogs, after eating and drinking a pan of water, really like to go out.) It's cousins, anaphora (several sentences with the same first word) and epistrophy ( sentences with the same word at the end) are more common, but not nearly as common as familiar garden-variety tropes like metaphor or alliteration.
Metaphor, in fact, is so common that some linguists argue that it is the force that drives all language formation. Others, like the 16th Century French logician and rhetorician Petrus Ramus and the 17th Century Italian historian philosopher Giambattista Vico made an early case for isolating metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony as the four winds that blow life into language. How this works is perhaps of some interest here.
These are the big two: Metaphor and Metonymy, the voltaic titans of language who divide the world of rhetoric between them. There is a third titan, irony, but it is a negative god that inhabits a parallel universe, an underworld that spins out a sort of rhetorical anti-matter which stands like a fun-house mirror image opposed to the bright world of Metaphor and Metonymy.
Define, Jakobson.
Then there is the pantheon of classical tropes.
Personification: which we will call prosopopiea hereafter for solid, scholarly reasons.
Assonance, consonance, and alliteration: which are mostly surface as poetic terms, but are valuable here as elements of prose style.
Hyperbole: I can not exaggerate too much its role in prose composition.
Simile and Synecdoche: These are specific cases of Metaphor and Metonomy respectively, and happen a lot is refined prose.
Amtithesis: A broad umbrella category which includes a fractious brood of rhetorical fingerlings like Oxymoron, epanilepsis, chiasmus, and epanados.
That was the varsity team. Then there is a junior varsity team of minor deities who swarm the page looking for a moment in the sun. They are exclusively Greek, a least in name. But they are found in languages around the world were they have been doing their narrow-bore artisanal work for centuries oblivious to the fact that the Greeks had a name for them.
Here we have:
Zeugma
Antimetabole
Anphora
Ellipsis
Epanilepsis
Enallage
Enthymeme
Polysyndeton
Antanaclasis
Aposiopesis
Asyndeton
Etc.