Tropes are characterized as discursive strategies and examined as objects of study from rhetorical and poetic perspectives; the operation of substitution of one word by another is proposed as a simple, working definition of a trope. Tropology is described as a philological discipline and the mechanisms underlying the formation and decoding of tropes are investigated in the analysis of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche: communicative intention, reference, imagery, presence in literary and scientific texts, semantic structure, and grammatical features are described. It is noted that tropological constructions cannot be reduced to a single discursive level but are products of the interaction between communicative competence, grammar, world knowledge, imagery, linguistic convention, and poetics (creative language use). (Copyright 1992, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (Z. Dubiel in LLBA 1992, vol. 26, n. 2)