Literary tropes: types, distinguishing features, use

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-17 12:35

Every word in Russian has a nominative meaning. This helps to correlate speech with reality and express thoughts. In addition to the main meaning, most words are included in a certain associative series and have an additional symbolic meaning, which is most often figurative. This lexical property is actively used by poets and writers to create works of art, and a similar phenomenon in the Russian language is called figures of speech and literary tropes. They give the text expressiveness and help to convey your idea more accurately.

Types of artistic and visual means

Among the tropes are epithets, similes, metaphors, personifications, metonymy, paraphrase, synecdoche, litotes, hyperbole. The ability to see them in the text of a work of art allows you to understand the ideological intent of the author, to enjoy the richness of the magnificent Russian language. And the use of tropes in one's own speech is a sign of a literate, cultured person who can speak accurately and expressively.

How to recognizein the text and learn how to apply literary tropes yourself?

Table with examples from fiction

Let's see how famous poets and writers do it.

Literary tropes	Property	Example
Epithet	Adjective, rarely a noun, adverb, gerund used in a figurative sense and denoting an essential feature of an object	"And blue eyes bottomless bloom…" (A. Blok)
Comparison	Turnover with unions AS, AS, AS AS, AS IF, or words SIMILAR, SIMILAR; noun in instrumental case; adjective or adverb in the comparative degree. The point is to liken	"The block seemed to me…expensive…, like a nightingale in a spring bush…" (K. Balmont)
Metaphor	Based on value transfer by similarity	"… soul with fire… full of " (M. Lermontov)
Incarnation	Animation of natural phenomena, objects	"Azure of heaven laughs…" (F. Tyutchev)
Metonymy	Transfer value by adjacency	"Rugal of Homer, Theocritus…" (A. Pushkin), i.e. their works
Synecdoche	Implies a value transfer based onratios in quantity: singular instead of plural and vice versa	"To him … and the beast will not come…" (A. Pushkin)
Hyperbole	Great exaggeration	"Man … with a fingernail" (N. Nekrasov)
Litota	Overunderstatement	"From the wings of a mosquito I made myself two shirt-fronts" (K. Aksakov)
Periphrase	The name of an object or phenomenon through an essential, well-recognized feature	"I love you, Peter's creation…" (A. Pushkin), i.e. Saint Petersburg

Thus, literary tropes - the table fully reflects their essential features - can be determined even by a person who does not have a special education. It is only necessary to delve into their essence. To do this, let's take a closer look at those means of expression that usually cause the most difficulty.

Metaphor and personification

Unlike comparison, in which there are two objects or phenomena - the original and the one taken for comparison, these literary tropes contain only the second. In a metaphor, similarity can be expressed in color, volume, shape, purpose, etc. Here are examples of this use of words in a figurative sense: " moon clock wooden", "noon breathes".

Incarnation differs from metaphor in thatwhich is a more extended image: "Suddenly rising wind tossed and groaned all night".

Metonymy, synecdoche, paraphrase

These literary tropes are often confused with the metaphor described above. To avoid such mistakes, it should be remembered that the manifestation of adjacency in metonymy can be as follows:

• content and what it includes: " eat a plate";
• author and his work: " remembered Gogol well";
• action and a tool to perform it: " villages were doomed to swords";
• item and material from which it is made: " porcelain at the exhibition";
• the place and the people in it: " the city didn't sleep anymore".

Synecdoche usually implies a quantitative relationship between objects and phenomena: "here everyone aims at Napoleons".

Periphrase

Sometimes writers and poets, for greater expressiveness and imagery, replace the name of an object or phenomenon with an indication of its essential feature. Paraphrasing also helps to eliminate repetitions and connect sentences in the text. Consider these literary tropes with examples: " shining steel" - dagger, " author of "Mumu" - I. Turgenev, " old woman with a scythe" - death.