A Semiotic Theory of Tropes

There are two interesting puzzles about tropes. They are literal nonsense, yet native speakers easily make sense of them. Moreover, despite the fact that tropes are literal nonsense, native speakers find them helpful in clarifying and enhancing meanings and sharpening reference. In this paper, there is an attempt to explain these puzzles through the use of theories of markedness and rank, as framed by Peirce’s semiotic theory. Tropes are nonsense in that they tend to violate the implicit rules of semantic fields. These create puzzles and anomalies for the native speakers to resolve—abductions—and they do so primarily by certain markedness and rank operations. By neutralizing or bracketing categorical ranks, speakers can see, more clearly, the similarity between the salient or marked features of elements from disparate semantic fields. This results in a more vivid sense of the targets of such tropes. Markedness assimilation can help sharpen reference or help to focus distinctions that make things clearer. Markedness reversals can also help in the manner, but can also obfuscate when that is appropriate.