What are tropes and why are they used in literary works

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

An integral part of any literary work are means of expression. They are able to make the text unique and individually author's. In literary criticism, such means are called tropes. You can learn more about what trails are by reading this article.

Fiction could not exist without various figures of speech, which give the works a special style. Any author, whether a poet or a prose writer, constantly uses tropes to help convey his own thoughts and emotions that he wants to express in his creation. It is a large number of tropes that distinguish works of art from other types of author's texts. So, let's talk in more detail about the means of speech expressiveness themselves: what they are, what types exist, which of them are most often used, what are their functions and features.

Find out what trails are. Tropes are figures of speech that make the text more expressive and lexical.varied. There are many types of these means: metaphor, metonymy, personification, hyperbole, synecdoche, parcellation, litote, epithet, comparison and others. Let's discuss these paths in more detail. There are really a lot of them in the Russian language, so some scientists tried to single out several such means of expression, from which all the others originated. So, after a series of studies, it was found that the "main" tropes are metaphor and metonymy. However, there is no single classification of means of speech expressiveness, since scientists could not determine a single trope from which all the others were formed.

Let's explain the meaning of the paths listed above.

Metaphor is a hidden comparison, such a turn of phrase that helps to compare several objects with each other without the help of the words “like”, “same as”, “similar to something”, and so on.

Metonymy is a means of speech expressiveness, which is the replacement of one word by another according to the principle of "adjacency".

Personification is the assignment of human qualities to inanimate objects.

Hyperbole is an exaggeration of any properties of an object.

Epithets are special paths. In literature, they occupy a very important place, as they characterize the features of an object: size, color. If we are talking about something animated, then this trope can clarify the character, appearance.

Parcellation is one of the syntactic expressive means that allows you to focus on the desired part of the sentence by separating itfrom the main sentence.

Now you have an idea of what trails are and what they are. This knowledge can be useful to you not only for the analysis of literary works, but also for creating your own author's texts. Keeping in mind the expressive function of tropes, you can easily diversify the vocabulary of your work with bizarre turns that will make it individual and unique.

So, knowing what paths are, you can create your own literary masterpieces that will turn out to be as unusual and individual as possible!