Contents Introduction I. Cognitive principle of foregrounding in the literary texts

1.4. Foregrounding Theory
The notion of foregrounding comes originally from the visual arts and refers to those elements of a work of art that stand out in some way from the norm. According to Russian formalist scholars working at the beginning of the last century, the purpose of art and literature is to defamiliarise the familiar, and by defamiliarising a work of art or a text we make it stand out from the norm - it becomes foregrounded. Foregrounding in linguistics was first postulated by Jan Mukařovsky (see Mukařovsky 1970). The term was adopted by a number of Prague scholars studying literary texts in the early twentieth century (van Peer 1986: 5) and was introduced to academics in the West, through translations, by Garvin (1964). Foregrounding theory was seen as a means of explaining the difference between poetic and everyday language, and despite criticism of this from scholars such as Fish (1973), it has become widely accepted as one of the foundations of stylistics (the modern definition of which is, broadly speaking, the linguistic study of how readers understand and are affected by literary and non-literary texts).
Foregrounding can be achieved in one of two ways, either via parallelism or by deviation. And the important point here is that anything that is foregrounded is highly interpretable and arguably more memorable. As Leech (1970) puts it:


Foregrounding, or motivated deviation from linguistic or other socially accepted norms, has been claimed to be a basic principle of aesthetic communication.
(Leech 1970: 121)

To begin with the first method of achieving foregrounding, linguistic parallelism can be defined as unexpected regularity within a text, as can be seen in the example below:

We have seen the state of our union in the endurance of rescuers working past exhaustion.

We’ve seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

We have seen the decency of a loving and giving people who have made the grief of strangers their own.

(Transcript of President George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress, 20/09/01, obtained from http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/ accessed 20/11/01)

The extract from President Bush’s speech is composed of three sentences that are all syntactically similar. Firstly, each sentence is in the present perfect tense, the effect of which is to emphasise the fact that although what Bush is talking about took place in the past, it is still relevant to events in the present. (The choice of tense here is in itself unusual, since American English does not make use of the present perfect as much as British English does.) Secondly, each sentence begins with the subject ‘we’ and the predicator ‘have seen’, after which there follows a noun phrase, or string of noun phrases, within which are embedded prepositional phrases. The last sentence differs slightly in that embedded within the noun phrase is a non-defining relative clause (‘who have made the grief of strangers their own’). The parallelism sets up a pattern between the three sentences and invites the reader to look for parallel meaning between them. As a result of the parallelism the positivity expressed by the noun phrase ‘the decency of a loving and giving people…’ is carried over onto the previous two sentences. The regularity of the syntactic pattern thus creates a foregrounding effect whereby the three sentences can all be seen to have the same positive overtones. And, of course, the rhetorical effect of the parallelism is to foreground the three sentences, and to make the message being conveyed stand out further. This, then, is foregrounding via linguistic parallelism, but foregrounding can also come about as a result of linguistic deviation. If parallelism is unexpected regularity, then deviation is unexpected irregularity. Deviating from accepted norms, then, produces a foregrounding effect. Take, for example, the following advertisement for a student night at a Lancaster nightclub:

Fig. 1 Flyer advertising ‘2:2UESDAY’, Elemental nightclub, Lancaster
The first point to notice about the advertisement is that the word ‘Tuesday’ is not being represented conventionally. Instead, it appears that the last six letters of ‘Tuesday’ have been added to the phrase ‘2:2’. In effect, the initial letter ‘T’ of ‘Tuesday’ has been replaced with a number ‘2’. The word ‘Tuesday’, then, is not being represented in its correct graphological form – in stylistic terms it is a graphological deviation. Nevertheless, because the initial consonant and vowel sound of ‘Tuesday’ is phonologically similar to the sound of ‘two’ it is still possible for us to make sense of the new representation of the word. Why, though, have the advertisers chosen to represent the word ‘Tuesday’ in this way? In order to answer this, we need to consider the meaning of the ‘2:2’ part of this new word. We need to know that a 2:2 is a class mark for an undergraduate degree. And, in addition to understanding this, it is also necessary to be aware of how a 2:2 degree is often regarded by students and academics, that is, we need to know about its pragmatic meaning. It is this knowledge that allows us to interpret the advert. A 2:2, as many students would no doubt testify, is commonly regarded as ‘the drinker’s degree’; the type of degree attained by those students who spend more time socialising than studying. With this information it is possible to understand why the advertisers have called their student night ‘2:2UESDAY’. They are playing with the notion that students who get 2:2 degrees are the most sociable, and suggesting to them that if they consider themselves to be one of these fun-loving people, then Tuesday night at Elemental is the place to be. The graphological deviation generates this density of meaning and creates a foregrounding effect. It makes the advert stand out as unusual and highly interpretable. And because of this, it is likely that the advert will be memorable to those who see it.⁸
The two examples given demonstrate how linguistic foregrounding can be achieved. However, foregrounding effects do not have to be linguistically based. For example, if you were to turn up to work one morning to find your boss dressed as a clown and singing loudly, you would no doubt conclude that his or her behaviour was deviant⁹, and thus foregrounded. And since anything that is foregrounded is highly interpretable you would be forced to look for an explanation for his or her deviant behaviour; perhaps your boss might be involved in a stunt to raise money for charity, or maybe the stress of the job might have finally driven him or her over the edge. In the next section I examine the ways in which non-linguistic foregrounding is created in LING 131 lectures in order to give students an effective learning experience and to make the lectures memorable. My discussion of how the lectures are foregrounded concentrates on how they deviate from what students expect, and in stylistics a distinction is made between internal and external deviation (Levin 1965: see Short 1996: 59 for an overview of the linguistic realisation of internal and external deviation). The 2:2UESDAY example is an instance of external deviation, since the graphological representation of the word deviates from a norm external to that particular text; i.e. the word ‘Tuesday’ is not represented as it would be in Standard English orthography. Internal deviation, on the other hand, is what happens when we get deviation from some norm set up by the text itself. For example, in Carol Anne Duffy’s poem ‘Poet for Our Times’, the first four lines of each stanza are graphologically conventional, and the last two lines of each stanza are written in uppercase letters to represent newspaper headlines; that is until the final stanza of the poem where the two lines in capital letters occur in the middle of the stanza:¹⁰

And, yes, I have a dream ‑ make that a scotch, ta ‑

that kids will know my headlines off by heart.
IMMIGRANTS FLOOD IN CLAIMS HEATHROW WATCHER.
GREEN PARTY WOMAN IS A NIGHTCLUB TART.
The poems of the decade . . . Stuff ’em! Gotcha!
The instant tits and bottom line of art.

(from ‘Poet for Our Times’ by Carol Anne Duffy)

The positioning in the last stanza of the two lines in uppercase letters is internally deviant – it deviates from the norm established by the previous stanzas in the poem. As a result of this, the final two lines (which now occupy the place we have come to expect the headlines to be) are foregrounded - and this turns out to have major interpretative consequences.¹¹

Again, the notion of internal and external deviation is not confined to texts. Returning to the example of arriving at work to find your boss singing his or her heart out in a clown suit, if your boss did this on a regular basis you would soon come to expect this behaviour – in a sense, it would become the norm, even though it would deviate from the behaviour we typically expect from bosses. However, if your boss then arrived at work one day dressed in a sombre grey suit and quietly got on with some work, you would now find this to be deviant behaviour, since it would deviate from the norm that your boss had established for him or herself. His or her behaviour would be internally deviant. In the following sections I discuss how LING 131 lectures are externally deviant; that is, how they deviate from what is perceived as being the norm in the lecture situation. I then consider how the lectures deviate internally in order to maintain the element of surprise generated by foregrounding.¹²
The important point here is that students will generally assume these ground rules to be in place. Any deviation from these rules, then, will constitute external deviation and will result in foregrounding. In the next section I consider the ways in which LING 131 deviates externally from the prototypical lecture.
To begin with, the method of presentation used on LING 131 is unconventional when compared to many other lectures (certainly within the Linguistics Department). LING 131 is team-taught, with two lecturers involved in giving each lecture. This is markedly different to the convention of one lecturer giving a speech for 50 minutes. The two-lecturer format deviates from point (d) in Gibbs et. al.’s (1988) list, which states that students assume a lecture to consist of one person lecturing continually for approximately one hour, thus creating a degree of foregrounding. There are several reasons for adopting the two-lecturer approach. Firstly, research has shown that students’ attention levels drop after the first ten minutes of a lecture and continue to do so unless they are actively involved in some way¹³. The two-lecturer format means that students at least get a change in speaker and this can be timed to coincide with those points where attention levels are likely to wane.
Secondly, using two lecturers increases what it is possible to do within a lecture in terms of presenting material. To take an example, in the 11^th lecture on the course we introduce the notion of proximal and distal deixis. Deixis is concerned with the issue of proximity in reference to spatial, temporal and social relations. Perhaps the most immediately obvious deictic items are here and there, which refer to a particular place in space and are clearly governed by where the speaker is situated. In the lecture in question, we illustrated this concept using the deictic terms this and that. Lecturer A stood at the back of the lecture theatre holding a red box, while Lecturer B stood at the front holding a blue box. They were then able to engage in a dialogue along the lines of: