Foregrounding Definition and Examples

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by Richard Nordquist
Updated April 26, 2017

(1) In literary studies and stylistics, linguistic strategies that call attention to themselves,
causing the reader's attention to shift away from what is said to how it is said.
(2) In systemic functional linguistics, foregrounding refers to a prominent portion of
atext that contributes to the total meaning. (The background provides the
relevantcontext for the foreground.)

Linguist M.A.K. Halliday has characterized foregrounding as motivated prominence:

"the phenomenon of linguistic highlighting, whereby some features of the language of a
text stand out in some way" (Explorations in the Functions of Language, 1973).

ETYMOLOGY:

A translation of the Czech word aktualizace, a concept introduced by the Prague

structuralists in the 1930s.

FOREGROUNDING (#1): EXAMPLES AND OBSERVATIONS

"Foregrounding is essentially a technique for 'making strange' in language, or

to extrapolate from Shklovsky's Russian term ostranenie, a method of
'defamiliarisation' in textual composition.

"Whether the foregrounded pattern deviates from a norm, or whether it

replicates a pattern through parallelism, the point of foregrounding as a stylistic
strategy is that it should acquire salience in the act of drawing attention to itself."
(Paul Simpson, Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2004)
"[T]his opening line from a poem by Roethke, ranked high [for the presence of
foregrounding]: 'I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.' The pencils
arepersonified; it contains an unusual word, 'inexorable'; it contains
repeatedphonemes such as /n/ and /e/."
(David S. Miall, Literary Reading: Empirical & Theoretical Studies. Peter Lang,
2007)

"In literature, foregrounding may be most readily identified with

linguisticdeviation: the violation of rules and conventions, by which a poet
transcends the normal communicative resources of the language, and awakens
the reader, by freeing him from the grooves of clich expression, to a new
perceptivity. Poeticmetaphor, a type of semantic deviation, is the most important
instance of this type of foregrounding."
(Peter Childs and Roger Fowler, The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms.
Routledge, 2006)

FOREGROUNDING (#2): EXAMPLES AND OBSERVATIONS

The basic idea in foregrounding is that the clauses which make up a text can be
divided into two classes. There are clauses which convey the most central or
important ideas in text, those propositions which should be remembered. And
there are clauses which, in one way or another, elaborate on the important ideas,
adding specificity or contextual information to help in the interpretation of the
 central ideas. The clauses which convey the most central or important
information are called foregrounded clauses, and their propositional content
isforeground information. The clauses which elaborate the central propositions
are called backgrounded clauses, and their propositional content
is backgroundinformation. So, for example, the boldfaced clause in the text
fragment below conveys foregrounded information while the italicized clauses
conveybackground.

(5) A text fragment: written edited 010:32

The smaller fish is now in an air bubble

spinning
and turning
and making its way upward

This fragment was produced by an individual recalling action she witnessed in a

brief animated film (Tomlin 1985). Clause 1 conveys foregrounded information
because it relates the critical proposition for the discourse at this point: the
location of the 'smaller fish.' The state of the air bubble and its motion are less
central to that description, so that the other clauses seem merely to elaborate or
develop a part of the proposition contained in clause 1."
(Russell S. Tomlin, "Functional Grammars, Pedagogical Grammars."Perspectives
On Pedagogical Grammar, ed. by Terence Odlin. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994)

"A great deal of stylistic foregrounding depends on an analogous process, by

which some aspect of the underlying meaning is represented linguistically at
more than one level: not only through the semantics of the textthe ideational
and interpersonal meanings, as embodied in the content and in the writer's
choice of his rolebut also by direct reflection in the lexicogrammar or
thephonology."
(M.A.K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic. Edward Arnold, 1978)

Foregrounding, Deviation and

Parallelism
This topic is all about how and why writersFOREGROUND parts of their texts and what
meanings and effects are associated with these foregroundings. The theory
of FOREGROUNDING is probably the most important theory within Stylistic Analysis, and
foregrounding analysis is arguably the most important part of the stylistic analysis of any
text.

The words 'foreground' and 'foregrounding' are themselves foregrounded in the previous
paragraph. They stand out perceptually as a consequence of the fact that
they DEVIATE graphologically from the text which surrounds them in a number of ways.
The other words are in lower case, but they are capitalised. The other words are black but
they are multicoloured. The other words are visually stable but they are irregular.

One way to produce foregrounding in a text, then, is through linguistic deviation. Another
way is to introduce extra linguistic patterning into a text. The most common way of
introducing this extra patterning is by repeating linguistic structures more often than we
would normally expect to make parts of texts PARALLEL with one another. So, for example,
if you look at the last three sentences of the previous paragraph you should feel that they
are parallel to one another. They have the same overall grammatical structure (grammatical
parallelism) and some of the words are repeated in identical syntactic locations.

Note that lots of the things we explored in terms of special meanings and effects in the
analysis of particular texts and textual extracts in Topics 1 and 2 can be re-cast in terms of
deviation, parallelism and foregrounding. You may find it helpful, after you have found out
more about these topics, to revisit those earlier parts of this website and think about them in
terms of foregrounding theory.

To sum up, we can say that:

Now we need to work on FOREGROUNDING, deviation and parallelism in more detail.