TropeLang

Chapter 5

The corpus & its tiers

Every tag in the snippets so far — Protagonist, Grifter, Betrays — came from somewhere. That somewhere is the corpus: a standard, layered library of vocabulary and tropes that ships with the language. It exists so that meaning is shared. A story you write and a trope someone else authored can recognize each other, because both are built from the same base.

Four tiers, bottom to top

The corpus is organized as a ladder, each tier resting on the ones below:

  1. Prelude — the root. The sigils, the type system, and the most universal vocabulary. Always in scope.
  2. Concepts — abstract nodes a story can be about: grief, power, betrayal, sacrifice — ideas a character can carry, fear, or pursue (a concept like grief is distinct from a state like [#Grieving]).
  3. Modules — reusable systems of implications and rules: the hero's journey, the five stages of grief, power dynamics. Vocabulary that travels together.
  4. Tropes — the named patterns themselves, each a small self-contained file: a preamble, its imports, the recognition rule, and a worked vignette.

On disk this is just a trl/ directory — prelude.trl, then concepts/, modules/, and tropes/, the latter sorted into categories (power, bonds, conflict, death, epistemic, and so on). Index files register each entry once, so the compiler builds one unified symbol table across the whole thing.

Founding: edges ground in something concrete

A rule keeps the corpus honest: every edge must ground in a declared node or a real concept. A character can be tied to grief only when grief exists as a concept the corpus knows. An edge whose endpoint resolves to nothing is unfounded — usually a typo or a missing import. 

concept grief
char mara [+Protagonist] [#Grieving]
mara -- grief : "cannot put it down"

The snippets here are checked against the standard corpus, so its vocabulary resolves — they aren't floating free. Founding is the discipline that the rest grounds too: every edge ties to a declared node or a corpus concept, so a story never quietly accumulates edges that point at nothing.

Why standardize at all

A trope is only useful if it recognizes stories beyond the one it was born in. That requires a common vocabulary — otherwise every author invents private words and nothing matches anything. The tiers also give ideas a path upward: a pattern that proves itself by being reused gets promoted — lifted from a one-off into a module or a ratified trope, so the next story gets it for free. The corpus grows the way a language does, by use — and how well it keeps up with the stories people actually write is what coverage measures.