Foregrounding

G. Leech & M. Short

 Foregrounding
Foreground (noun)
1. The part of a scene or
picture that is nearest to
and in front of the
viewer. (opposed to
background).
2.a prominent or important
position; forefront.
 In Visual Art
 The term ‘foregrounding’ is borrowed by
stylisticians from visual art, which distinguishes
between the foreground and the background of
a painting. The theory of foregrounding is
probably the most important theory within
Stylistic Analysis.
Contents:

 Foregrounding
 Theoretical Background.
 Theory on Foregrounding.
 Linguistic Deviation.
 Types of Deviation.
 Parallelism (Repition)
 Conclusion
 Theoretical Background
of Foregrounding
Jan Mukarovsky, one of the leading exponents
of the prague linguistic circle, was the first to
postulate the concept of foregrounding . in his
famous article "standard language and poetic
language", he (1970:43) states.
Foregrounding is the opposite of
automatization, that is the deautomatization of an
act, the more an act is automatized the less
consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded
the more completely conscious does it become.
 Automatization refers to the common or
familiar use of linguistic devices which does not
attract particular attention by the language
decoder, for example, the use of discourse
markers (e.g. well, you know, sort of, kind of) in
spontaneous spoken conversations.
Deautomization is a term sometimes
translated as “making it strange” or
“defamiliarization” as illustrated by Shklovsky in
1914 when he argued that the work of literature
was “the resurrection of the word.” (Katerina
Clark, Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 191,
1984)
 Theory on Foregrounding
 Foregrounding is realized by linguistic deviation
and linguistic parallelism (syntagmatic –
repetition of the same element).

Foregrounding

Deviation Parallelism

Figure 1 The Realization of Foregrounding (Leech)

 Linguistic Deviation
It is the specific use of language that goes beyond its
linguistic convention. Hence, when a writer wants to make
his language to be creative or inventive, he uses the language
that is different from the conventional and everyday
language. He invents and modifies some lexical, grammatical
or structural elements for the immediate use in order to give
his readers unexpected surprise and makes a strong
impression on their minds. This creative kind of the language
is technically called linguistic deviation, by which a writer
creates a new language deviated from the norms of the
literary convention or every day speech (Leech, A Linguistic
Guide to English Poetry,1969, p. 57).
Thus, as leech puts it, "foregrounding is the
motivated deviation from linguistic or other socially
accepted norm.“(p. 121)
e. g: "The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.“
(Carl Sandburg’s The Fog)
 According to Leech and Short (Style in
Fiction, 1981) these are the main types of
deviation.
1. Morphological deviation.
2. Phonological deviation.
3. Graphological deviation.
4. Lexical deviation.
5. Semantic deviation.
6. Syntactic deviation.
 Morphological Deviation
The lowest unit of syntactic organization is
the word. Morphemes are the building blocks for
words. ‘Bookshelf ’, for example, consists of two
morphemes, ‘book’ and ‘shelf ’. These are free
morphemes because they can stand freely as
words. There are bound morphemes like ‘unclean’
represented in the negation marker Un-.
‘Un/fortun/ate/ly’ consists of four morphemes,
one free and three bound.
|One way to produce deviation at a morphological
level is by adding an ending to a word it would not
normally be added to:
e.g. perhapsless mystry of paradise. (E. E.
Cummings, “From Spiralling Ecstatically
This”)
The suffix –less is added to nouns (e.g. sunless,
hatless), but ‘perhaps’ is an adverb. By comparing
‘perhapsless’ with the norm we can see that
Cummings is pointing to an apparently
contradictory quality of heaven, a mystry without
certainty.
Another way to create a morphological deviation is by
playing around word boundaries:
e.g. I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin,… (Hopkins, The
Windhover)
The word kingdom is broken over a line boundary. As
a result we are invited to think harder about the
meaning, ‘king’ is obvious enough, but ‘-dom’ here is
historically the same morpheme as ‘doom’, meaning
‘judgement’. Hopkins through this description of the
windhover, is writing a praise to Christ.
 Phonological Deviation
It is the deviation in sound or pronunciation
which is done deliberately in regard to preserving the
rhyme, as when the noun wind is pronounced like the
verb wind. Leech considers the phonological deviation
as irregularities of pronunciation.
The phonological deviation is associated with
the social class. All phonetic behavior is determined by
individual and social needs.
Sometimes deviation from the normal use of
sounds or mispronunciation of sounds may be the
result of habit, e.g. childish mispronunciation.
e.g. "I'm th' one single Hand in Bounderby's mill , o' the men
theer ,as don't coom in wi th' proposed reg'lations . I canna' coom
in wi em' . My friends, I doubt their doin' yo onny good . Licker
they'll do yo hurt ( Dickens, Hard Times).
The Analysis:
"th'" (=the) "o'" (=of) "theer" (=there) "coom“ (=come)
"reglations" (=regulations) "canna" (=cann't)
"doin'" (=doing) "yo" (=you) "onny" (=any) "lickr“ (=likelier) .
Substitution of Sounds
Mr. Sleary has a defect in pronunciation. He is a stout man. He is
troubled with asthma and whose breath comes far too thick and
heavy which affects his pronunciation with the sound /s/ and
/z/ and makes it /θ / sound. Dickens shows how factory fumes
affects people.
 Graphological Deviation
“It refers to the whole writing system:
punctuation and paragraphing as well as spacing”
(Leech 1969,p.69). These are the graphological features
in a text which strike our mind at first sight. They play a
major role in analyzing the text before noticing lexical
and grammatical features. Graphology is very useful and
subtle. Capitalization, hyphenation, italization,, use of
parenthesis, bullets, font styles and underlining creates a
great impact and produces powerful influence on the
minds of readers.
e.g. Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, speaks in capital
letters, when addressing foreigner: “HOW DO YOU LIKE
LONDON?” Such mimicry often extends to the use of
spelling to suggest a character’s unusual accent with
foreigners. When we come to this sentence, we must say it
louder, more slowly and with very wide pitch span.
e.g.“For Thine is….
Life is…
For Thine is the…”
Dash is used to show a comment or after thought at the end
of a sentence, or simply an incomplete utterance.
Sometimes it is used to signaling a missing word or letter.
These lines from Eliot’s The Hollow Men shows their
inability to complete their prayer because of their
hollowness.
 Lexical Deviation
The most obvious example of lexical
deviation is neologism. Neologism is a new word
or example which is introduced into language, e.g.
nonce-formation. Nonce formation is the
invention of new words. A word is considered to
be a nonce-formation, if it is made up for the
nonce, i.e. for a single occasion (Leech, 1969: 42).
 A nonce-formation is a linguistic form which a
speaker consciously invents or accidentally uses on a
single occasion. Many factors account for its uses, e.g.
a speaker cannot remember a particular word, so it is
coined as an alternative approximation (as in
linguistified, heard recently from a student who felt he
was getting with linguistics), or isconstrained by
circumstances to produce a new form (as in
newspaper headlines). Nonce-formations have come
to be adopted by the community in which case they
cease by definition to be nonce and become
neologisms.
 Another example of lexical deviation is
functional conversion. It is the process of converting
a word from one grammatical class to another. This
process is common in literary language (Short, 1969:
46). Sometimes "slip of the tongue" or "speech error"
in which one deviates in some way from the intended
utterance to form a new word, can be considered
another example of lexical deviation. Some of these
tongue slips are called malapropism. It refers to the
misuse of words which comes when Mrs. Slipslop
says “convicted" for “convinced“ (From Henry
Fielding’s Joseph Andrews)
 Semantic Deviation
According to Leech (1969)," It is reasonable to
translate semantic deviation mentally into 'non-sense'
or 'absurdity' "(p. 48).
Semantic deviation deals with what Leech
(1969), calls as "Tropes foregrounded irregularities of
content" (p.131). He states that they are classified into
three sections: 1. Semantic oddity/ 2. Transfer of
meaning. / 3. Honest Deception.
1. Semantic Oddity: means semantic peculiarity or
strangeness of expressions, such as Oxymorn, and
Paradox have semantic absurdity that contains self-
conflicting information (Leech, 1969).
2. Transference of Meaning: it is classified into four
tropes of figurative language: Synecdoche, Metonymy,
Metaphor, and Simile (Leech, 1969).
3. Honest Deception: it is classified into three
tropes“ Hyperbole "the figure of over-statement",
Litotes "The figure of understatement", and Irony
"(p.166). The three are connected in the sense that
they all misrepresent the truth (ibid).
 Oxymoron means “juxtaposing elements that appear to
be contradictory” e.g. random order, open secret, same
difference.
 Paradox means a statement that apparently contradicts
itself and yet might be true. e.g. “A rich man is no richer
than a poor man.”
 Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a term for a
part of something refers to the whole of something, or
vice versa. e.g.referring to workers as hired hands.
 Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or
concept is called not by its own name but rather by the
name of something associated in meaning with that thing
or concept. e.g. Scepter and crown/ Must tumble
down/ And in the dust be equal made /With the poor
crooked scythe and spade. (James Shirley, “Dirge”)
 Simile a figure of speech involving the comparison
of one thing with another thing of a different kind,
used to make a description more emphatic or vivid
e.g. brave as a lion ,” my love is like a red red rose”
 Metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies one thing
as being the same as some unrelated other thing. e.g.
“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day,” is an
extended analogy between the love of the speaker and
the fairness of the summer season. (Shakespeare,
Sonnet 18)
 Hyperbole: e.g.I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.

 Litotes: e.g.”Death, thou shalt die.” (John Done)

 Syntactic Deviation
The number of grammatical rules in English is large,
therefore the foregrounding possibilities via grammatical
deviation is also very large (Short,1969: 47).
One important feature of grammatical deviation is the
case of ungrammatical such as: " I dose not like him“
(Leech, 1969: 45). It is worth mentioning that grammatical
deviation indicates the social classes of the speakers. The
existence of differences in language between social classes
can be shown in the following sentences:
 Uneducated Class Educated Class

I aint done nothing .I haven't done anything

.I weren't me that done it .I didn't do it
 Parallelism (Repitition)
The word parallelism is derived from Greek "Paralelas"
which means phrases or sentences of similar construction and
meaning placed side by side, balancing each other (. Parallelism
is not a merely a mechanical repetition, it requires some
contrasting elements in any paralytic's pattern there must be an
elements of contrast.
Leech (1969) argues that if a parallelism occurs in a
poem, people feel that there. must be some deeper motivation
or justification which should be sought. Every parallelism has
a relationship of equivalence between two elements namely,
the elements which are singled out by the pattern as being
paralleled.
 Parallelism has the power to produce
foregrounding in a text by inviting the reader to
search for the meaning connections between the
parallel structures, thus foregrounding is not only a
result of linguistic deviation, and it is also a result
of repetition and parallelism (Short, 1969)
e.g. Blow, blow, thou winter wind
(Shakespeare, As You Like It)
Wind is greater than usual, the speaker has
stronger feelings about it than usual.
e.g. Repetition is the fundamental element of The Hollow Men
by T. S. Eliot, as it can be found from the very beginning to
the very end, not only emphasising structures, words and
ideas, but also giving us the impression of paralysis of the
actions taking place.
We are the hollow men,
We are the stuffed men.
……….
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Everything in this poem is circular, repetitive and somewhat
absurd, like a group of children dancing and singing round
and round increasing the sense of aimlessness and paralysis.
Conclusion:
Foregrounding theory is required for the analysis of literary
works. This theory yields the best conclusions in textual
analysis that it is indispensable to describe the specific features
and characteristics of any text and explain the poetic effects
on the reader. Foregrounding device, devices of deviation and
parallelism, will lose their important value if they are not
developed. Novelty is reached to by violation of rules, and
violation is seen here as breaking up everyday routine.
Therefore, how can we expect the unexpected? Such question
and enquires should be the main concern of researchers in
this field. All in all, foregrounding is the best theory for
innovation in literature because it gives unexpected forms of
novelty and creativity.