ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the author's own concept of troping and Lawrence Zbikowski's synthesis of Gilles Fauconnier's notion of conceptual blending and George Lakoff's notion of conceptual metaphor. It describes, however, that the author's theory of troping has certain key advantages. The chapter explores some of the consequences of this distinction with respect to the style-historical reconstruction of degrees of creativity, the ways in which tropological interpretation is compositionally cued and constrained, and the semiotic motivations that guide tropological interpretation. It begins by reviewing the philosopher Max Black's interaction theory of metaphor. Black's 'submerged model' conjecture is actually made explicit in Fauconnier's geometry of mental spaces, each of which is equivalent to one of Black's implicative complexes, and their interactive mapping also recalls Black's isomorphism. The author's favourite example is found in the theme launching the Allegro finale of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in A Major, Op. 101.
