trope

=Trope=

toc This article defines a word and clarifies its application and usefulness in scale studies. It is only the word's use in philosophy and rhetorci that applies to scale studies.

=Definition= Trope from the Greek tropos (a turning), tropë (a turn), or trepein (to turn) has long been used as a technical term in rhetoric to designate the use of a word or expression in a different sense than that which properly belongs to it in order to give liveliness, emphasis, perspective, coloration, or some other quality to an idea. In recent times, the social scientists have narrowed its meaning to the study of figures of speech in discourse, and how such figurative expression can be used persuasively to affect the understanding of social situations and consequently effect social interaction. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) along these lines argued in his New Science (1725) that it was the tropes that enabled human understanding, or at least the escape from misunderstanding.

Trope is defined by Quintilian as "the artificial alteration of a word or phrase from its proper meaning to another," and the related term figure as "a change in meaning or langauge from the ordinary and simple form". For Fontanier tropes are "all the figures of discourse which consist of the divergent meaning of words, i.e. of a meaning more or less removed and different from their proper and literal meaning," and figures are "the characteristics, forms and turns . . . by which discourse, in the expression of ideas, thoughts and feelings, stands more or less apart from what would have been their simple and common expression." (Encyc. Of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton).

Such classic formulations presuppose both a norm of "proper" meanings and "ordinary" usage from which tropes and figures can then diverge (to which Todorov objects that, by this definition, "ordinary" lang. only becomes retrospectively— and inaccurately—viewed as lang. as it ought to be, "normal"), and also a qualitative distinction between changes in the meanings of words (tropes), and changes in the words and meanings of larger units of discourse (figures). It would appear that there are only changes of meaning in the uses of individual words in such tropes as "rose" for a quality of affection or beauty in "My love is a rose" (metaphor), or "the White House" for the U. S. government (metonymy), or "hands" for seamen in "All hands on deck!" (synecdoche). But the words "rose," "the White House," or "hands" could not have any altered meaning as individual words (tropes) without an altered or at least specified context of words and meanings (figures), following Austin's argument that individual words alone can never have any meaning at all without context (1961). Trope could thus appear to be a compressed instance of, and figure to be an expanded trope.

=Usage=

The changing nature of scales, while using the same word between them, is a case of trope: for example, when a single text discussed meters on the nano-scale and meters on the cosmic scale, meters may be a trope.