instruction:
Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.
question:
The synonym of trope is defined as metaphor, but there seem to be some other implications when using the word trope that metaphor does not have. Can anyone explain this simply and sensibly?.
answer:
The word trope has shot to prominence in the last couple of decades... And as this article points out, 'Trope is the New Meme', which I read in two ways. Use of the word itself has become a meme (pattern of behavior that spreads throughout a culture). But also, the meaning of the word has shifted for many people. To quote from that article... trope has to do with an agreed-upon narrative, an archetypal reading of a story or situation according to the simplest and most widely-held beliefs, a kind of narrative stereotype. Or, as the excellent site tvtropes puts it... tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. I actually studied literature over 40 years ago, but I can't say I remember us using the word in the 'typical' dictionary sense as given by OED... A figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it; also, in casual use, a figure of speech; figurative language. So far as I'm concerned, if someone wants to use it like that, I'm not going to argue with them or their dictionaries. But most current usages are more in line with my first two definitions above. Here's how tvtropes knits the two definitions together... Merriam-Webster gives a definition of 'trope' as a 'figure of speech.' In storytelling, a trope is just that a conceptual figure of speech, a storytelling shorthand for a concept that the audience will recognize and understand instantly.


question:
Is there a word that describes or denotes a type of conversation in which two speakers speak two different languages. In our country, Pakistan, there are approximately 75 languages, from which Urdu, Punjabi and Sindhi are common, excluding English. So today I found two women speaking two different languages. For example: Speaker 1 has Urdu as their mother tongue. Speaker 2 has Sindhi as their mother tongue. Speaker 1 and 2 spoke their own mother tongue, which are different (Urdu and Sindhi) but both can understand each other's language. I thought that this is known as 'intermingling conversation,' or a 'code switching.' In my opinion, we can't use such words because code-switching refers 'shifting completely to the other language for a word, a phrase or sentence, and then revert back to the base language.' Example sentences: They were in a bus and had [adjective] conversation. They were in a bus and had [noun or noun-phrase for such conversation]. I agree that the question (which is suspected as a duplicate one to this question) is really a duplicate, but its single answer still doesn't satisfy all. In that question, the phrase 'bilingual dialogue' was suggested, which I (and others may) think that this refers to the code switching as well, which I don't want here. Some words confuse the readers which sense do they mean. I would also love to quote the comment of @Lambie regarding the term 'bilingual' over here: 'Bilingual refers to one person. Not two people each of whom has a passive knowledge of the other's language but do not speak it well enough to use it actively.'.
answer:
In his book Talk in Two Languages, Joseph Gafaranga examines, among other things, the patterns of conversation within bilingual families. He calls the pattern described in the OP's question the parallel mode. Here is a screenshot from Google Books of the introduction to his discussion of the parallel mode pattern. So by Gafaranga's terminology the Urdu and Sindhi speakers were conducting a conversation in parallel (language) mode.


question:
There are many English words with silent letters, words like gnome or island that are spelt with consonants that aren't pronounced, but are there any words that work the other way round, with a pronunciation that includes extra sounds or syllables that are not in the spelling? I can't think of any real examples, hence this question, but a made-up example would be if gnome were spelt nome but pronounced with a g at the start. Or if people started pronouncing offer as 'ofter' as a sort of weird parallel to after. Note: I don't mean words like rough, where the f sound is spelt gh, because in those cases the spelling does still include letters (however seemingly illogical) for each of the sounds.
answer:

Probably 'yes', but it depends on what you mean. There isn't actually a clear way to identify which sounds in a word correspond to which letters: for example, rough, which you say has letters for 'each of the sounds', could be analyzed as r- + -ou- + -gh or as r- + -o- + ugh. When similar issues arise with other words, it makes it pretty subjective to decide whether the word has consonant sounds that 'aren't part of the spelling' or that just have an complex relationship to the spelling. Some words that could be considered to meet your criteria: Consonants Any word with an epenthetic voiceless plosive between a nasal and a following consonant. For many speakers, a productive process causes a sound like /t/, /p/ or /k/ to be inserted after the sounds /n/, /m/ or // respectively in various environments. In most words, the epenthetic plosive is not written, so you could say that there is a /p/ in the pronunciation but not the spelling of warmth, dreamt, hamster, seamstress, a /t/ in the pronunciation but not the spelling of sense, glance, a /k/ in the pronunciation but not the spelling of strength, angst. In eighth and in one pronunciation of threshold, a digraph that usually represents a single sound corresponds instead to two sounds: /t/ and /h/ respectively. You could say that the /t/ in eighth or the /h/ in that pronunciation of threshold isn't part of the spelling. Something similar applies for speakers who use the pronunciation /hat/ instead of /hat/: whether it's spelled height or heighth, it seems like one of the two sounds at the end is not explicitly represented in the spelling. In some accents of British English, the vowels found in words like saw and draw is regularly followed by epenthetic /r/ before another vowel. This means that the words sawing and drawing are pronounced with an /r/ that 'isn't part of the spelling'. Vowels or syllables Many words with syllabic resonants, or sequences of a schwa followed by a resonant, have no particular letter that marks the syllabicity. Words ending in -thm or -sm are the most obvious example. Other examples are more dialect dependent, but words like hour are disyllabic for some speakers.


