tropaladj.

1875 A. Cayley in Q. Jrnl. Pure & Appl. Math. 13 127 The quartic surface has also four tropes (planes which touch the surface along a conic)..the conic of contact or tropal conic in each plane being the intersection of the plane with the before-mentioned quadric surface.

1875 A. Cayley in Q. Jrnl. Pure & Appl. Math. 13 128 Ordinary tropal planes each touching the surface in a proper conic.

1938 T. G. Room Geom. Determinantal Loci xii. 275 A Steiner surface of which the tropal conics lie in the planes Γ_ρ.

1956 Times Lit. Suppl. 20 Jan. 38/4 It is in the schematic and tropal figures of rhetoric that the verbal, intellectual and deliberative area of Milton's personality marches with the imaginative, mystical and unconscious.

1975 Hist. & Theory 14 83 This pushes the metahistorian to some ‘deeper’ level in order to account for the tropal combination in question.

1989 R. H. Brown Social Sci. as Civic Disc. vi. 113 There are four tropal models of encodation available in language. These are synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, and irony.

1994 Rhetoric Soc. Q. 24 53 The rhetorical ability to bring something not immediately present before the eyes..by varied linguistic means—semantic, logical, tropal, narratival, etc.—has long been virtually synonymous with the main traditions of rhetoric deriving from Aristotle and Cicero.

2009 Rhetorica 27 202 The most dramatic overall difference between its style and that of earlier orations..can be found in the absence of the classical high style.., whose ornateness and tropal elegance has attracted so much critical attention.