ABSTRACT
The author, defining tropes as semantic turns or redirections from strict denotations, guided by selectional restrictions, traces their history from antiquity through to so-called “conceptual metaphor theory.” Special attention is paid to that most celebrated of tropes, metaphor, as well as metonymy and synecdoche. Two basic modes of persuasive effects are described and illustrated. In one mode (“Love is a red, red, rose”) tropes persuade by condensing certain conceptual alignments (such as those of similarity, opposition, correlation, or meronymy) into distinctive expression. In the other mode (“Love is unstoppable”) expressions tap into broad, mundane frames (in this case, an emotion:force frame) that encode specific conceptual alignments.
