Trope

A trope is a word or expression used in a figurative sense for the sake of artistic expressiveness, when the direct meaning yields to the figurative one on the basis of similarity, contiguity, contrast or another semantic link. Tropes include metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, epithet, simile, hyperbole, litotes, irony, allegory, symbol and periphrasis. Tropes are the core of the imagery of poetic speech: they create new, unexpected connections between phenomena, enrich meaning and activate the reader's imagination. Unlike stylistic figures, which concern the syntactic organisation of speech, tropes operate at the level of the lexical meaning of the word. The study of tropes is a central section of poetics and of the stylistics of the literary text.