The tenor-vehicle relationship in terms of psychology, logic and linguistics

Tropes are the figures of rhetoric that create imagery. A rhetorical image is a double picture generated by linguistic means and based on the co-presence of two thoughts of different things active together – in I.A.Richards terminology, on the co-presence of a “tenor” and a “vehicle”. The tenor is the subject of thought in a trope; the vehicle is the concept of a thing, person or an abstract concept with which the tenor is compared or identified.

The image, i.e the tenor-vehicle relationship, can be described from more than one viewpoint, it has several aspects.

Psychologically, images are based on association, or the mental process of establishing connections between ideas, feelings, sensations, etc. From the point of view of logic images are based on analogy, or a form of reasoning in which one thing is inferred to be similar to another thing in a certain respect, both things being different on the whole. The connection, the similar feature is known as tertium comparationis or the ground. Linguistically, a trope is an opposition set up between the deviant segment and the paradigm of elements that would be normal in the given context, i.e. it is an interaction between usual and unusual collocations.

In terms of semantics tropes can be described in the following way. The lexical meaning is a combination of elementary semantic items called semes.

In a trope the tenor-vehicle antithesis develops a kind of semantic tension in the deviant collocation which results in the breakdown of the lexical meaning to semes and their rearrangements a new nucleus and new peripheral semes appear. The new nucleus may consist of the semes which have formerly also been part of the nucleus and of the semes which have formerly been peripheral but are now accentuated.