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

1.2. Examples of Foregrounding in Stylistics
The study of literary stylistics or distinctive styles in writing looks at the role of foregrounding by analyzing the effect that it has on a piece as a whole. In other words, how does foregrounding impact the composition of a piece and the experience of readers? These excerpts from scholarly writing on the subject attempt to define this.
"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," (Simpson 2004).
"This opening line from a poem by Roethke, ranked high for the presence of foregrounding]: 'I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.' The pencils are personified; it contains an unusual word, 'inexorable'; it contains repeated phonemes such as /n/ and /e/" ²
"In literature, foregrounding may be most readily identified with linguistic deviation: 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 cliché expression, to a new perceptivity. Poetic metaphor, a type of semantic deviation, is the most important instance of this type of foregrounding," (Childs and Fowler 2006).
Examples of Foregrounding in Systemic Functional Linguistics
Foregrounding from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics presents a slightly different angle, described in the following passage by linguist Russel S. Tomlin, that looks at the device on a much smaller scale. "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 is foreground information. The clauses which elaborate the central propositions are called backgrounded clauses, and their propositional content is background information. So, for example, the boldfaced clause in the text fragment below conveys foregrounded information while the italicized clauses convey background. 
This fragment was produced by an individual recalling action she witnessed in a brief animated film. 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," ³
M.A.K. Halliday offers another description of foregrounding in systemic functional linguistics: "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 text—the ideational and interpersonal meanings, as embodied in the content and in the writer's choice of his role—but also by direct reflection in the lexicogrammar or the phonology," ⁴
There is some evidence that foregrounding in literary texts strikes readers as interesting and captures their attention. Hunt and Vipond investigated the effects of textual features that they, following Labov, refer to as "discourse evaluations." These are described as "words, phrases, or events" that are "unpredictable against the norm of the text" and that convey the narrator's evaluations of story characters or events. Since discourse evaluations resemble foregrounding as discussed in the present report, Hunt and Vipond's findings are noteworthy. In a study with readers of a short story, they found that readers were more likely to report that story phrases "struck them" or "caught their eye" when presented with the original discourse evaluations than when those phrases had been adapted so that the same story events were described in relatively "neutral" terms.
Examples: 1. Sillitoe’s text Now you’d think, and I’d think, and everybody with a bit of imagination would think, that we’d done as clean a job as could ever be done, that with the baker’s shop being at least a mile from where we lived, and with not a soul having seen us, and what with the fog and the fact that we weren’t more than five minutes in the place, that the coppers should never have been able to trace us. But then, you’d be wrong, I’d be wrong and everybody else would be wrong, no matter how much imagination was diced out between us.
1. Foregrounding in Sillitoe’s text (α1) Now you’d think, and I’d think, and everybody with a bit of imagination would think, that we’d done as clean a job as could ever be done, that (β1) with the baker’s shop being at least a mile from where we lived, (β2) and with not a soul having seen us, (β3) and what with the fog and the fact that we weren’t more than five minutes in the place, that the coppers should never have been able to trace us. (α2) But then, you’d be wrong, (α3) I’d be wrong (α4) and everybody else would be wrong, (β4) no matter how much imagination was diced out between us. 1.1. Foregrounded features and stylistic effect The impression the reader gets when reading this passage is that of a cleverly structured text which effectively recounts an experience. Its effectiveness and vividness are due in great measure to the following factors: a) The recursion of clauses, mainly through co-ordination, with similar or identical structure; b) The distribution of clauses in groups of threes, producing a striking pattern of parallelisms:
Now you’d think α1 and I’d think and everybody…would think ⎦that we’d done…as ever could ever be done that β1 with the baker’s…lived β2 and with not…seen us β3 and what with the fog and the fact that…place that the coppers should never…trace us But then α2 You’d be wrong α3 I’d be wrong α4 and everybody…wrong β4 No matter…between us Even the final arrangement is that of three blocks of clauses, realizing a symmetrical pattern where a contradiction is expressed between the two symmetrical elements (the clauses ‘you’d think’, ‘I’d think’, etc., and the clauses you’d be wrong, I’d be wrong, etc.). The contradiction is in a way made more prominent by the insertion of the group of subordinated clauses between them, having a stronger dramatic effect, which makes the reader try to anticipate what is going to be said. c) The third factor is lexical repetition in the co-ordinated units; the effect produced by the recursion on the syntactic level can be said to be reinforced by the repetition of the lexical items. This is particularly noticeable in the independent clauses (‘You’d think’, ‘I’d think’, etc., and ‘You’d be wrong’, ‘I’d be wrong’, etc.), though it also appears in the subordinated clauses. The text seems to present a contrast between features that characterize spoken, colloquial language on the one hand, and a complex structural pattern that is more typical of written, more formal varieties of language, on the other. There are several features that characterize spoken versus written language: first, the use of co-ordination. Extensive use of co-ordination is usually said to be preferred in spoken language to subordination, since it ‘simplifies the planning of sentence structure.⁵
In the second place, we can notice other features, such as the first person narrative reinforced by direct address to the reader, with expressions such as ‘you’d be wrong’, ‘you know’, ‘to tell you the truth’, which are recurrent in the novel and which contribute to the conversational tone of the narration. Thirdly, there is the use of nonstandard forms of the language, though no instances in the particular extract I am analyzing. Throughout the novel we can find examples such as: the use of ‘them’ for the demonstrative ‘those’; use of ‘was’ for ‘were’; use of ungrammatical past participles, as in ‘could have took’, etc. These features seem to go well with the colloquial character of the passage, but are even more striking if we consider the parallel structures and the lexical repetitions that seem to be so carefully arranged in the text. Also, and in spite of the predominance of paratactic relations, the length of sentence 1 and the inclusion of several subordinate and embedded clauses make it difficult to imagine that the passage could have been realized in spoken form. Its rhetorical elaboration reminds us of a prepared speech; it is not for the vocabulary used and the content of the text.
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paperweight. Both metaphors, by attributing "sadness" and then "dolor" to inanimate objects, require readers to create an alternative meaning which is at once conceptually novel and affectively enriched. Also in these lines, feeling connotations of the phonemic and metrical features support the metaphorically initiated shift in meaning: the alliteration of [p], which both reinforces the orderliness of the objects and creates a muffling restraint in the sound; the unusual succession of three dactylic feet in the first line, which is responsible for the sensation of falling towards the stress on "pencils." These and other stylistic features of Roethke's poem present novel and richly felt aspects of otherwise familiar office items. Our approach to understanding literary comprehension thus calls for a model with a number of features not found in most modern theories of text comprehension. We argue that, without major modification, text theories (as we will call them) cannot be extended to the study of literary texts, such as short stories or poetry. Although some features of literary texts overlap with normal texts, their special style suggests that they inhabit a universe whose laws are distinctive. Despite two millennia of theories about what those laws might be, from Aristotle to the present day, we are still a long way from grasping what actually happens when a reader understands a literary text, or whether literary texts perform specific functions that set them apart from other texts. Moreover, the empirical study of these questions has only just begun; we have seen just a handful of studies in the last 10 to 20 years—a few in Europe, somewhat more in North America. Many of these, however, are concerned with literary education rather than the process of the reader's response to literature. We are especially concerned with the relations between defamiliarization, feeling, and personal perspectives and meanings. Although these relations have received almost no empirical study, we believe they are fundamental to the distinctively literary mode of comprehension. Our approach has led us to formulate some principles that build on a tradition initiated by the Romantic theorists at the beginning of the 19th century, especially Coleridge, and continued by the theorists of the Russian Formalist group and the Prague Linguistic Circle in the earlier part of the 20th century. In this tradition, a significant role is given both to defamiliarization and to feeling. We see our research as an extension of this tradition: At its center is the elaboration of a theoretical and empirically testable model of literary response, guided by the work of these several generations of literary theorists. The main purpose of the present article is to discuss some of the central contrasts between text theories and defamiliarization theory, in the hope that workers in the text theory tradition will modify and develop their tools of analysis to take account of the distinctive problems of understanding literary response.
Such stylistic devices (e.g., metaphor, alliteration) engage the reader's feelings and evoke less prototypic, more personal meanings. We suggest that, to the extent that feelings are self-referential, stylistically initiated involvement in a literary text will prompt personal readings; interpretations more likely will reflect individual variations in perspective and history. In response to Roethke's lines, for example, some readers will elaborate the "sadness of pencils" by remembering youthful impatience with lethargic pencils, pads, and paperweights; other readers will elaborate the meaning of these lines by recalling adult desk-weary discouragement. Such diversity challenges his model because the resulting text interpretations will not be among the "immediate associates and semantic neighbors" that constitute the "core meaning" of a concept.
Modern text theories are based on a postulate similar to Spencer's: The function of style is to economize comprehension. In general, text theories describe a resource-limited system in which cognitive structures (e.g., story grammars) or procedures (e.g., integrating processes) economize comprehension by deleting irrelevant propositions, inferring relevant propositions, and building macropropositions. The economizing effects of these structures and procedures per se are substantiated by an impressive body of empirical studies which range from word recognition to story recall. However, whether or not the stylistic features of literary texts also have economizing effects is the issue that separated Shklovsky and Spencer and that separates contemporary text theory from defamiliarization theory. According to defamiliarization theory, literary texts reverse the economizing effects of story grammars, schemata, and so forth. The distinctive stylistic variations in literary texts complicate comprehension by challenging the familiar, prototypic concepts that readers initially apply to the text (see Table 1, where we list this and the other main contrasts between the theories that we will be discussing). Text theories and defamiliarization theory also differ in the typical discourse examples that are selected for study. In text theories, which deny special characteristics to literary texts, exemplary texts are those that present a normal sequence of narrative or expository propositions. Such texts, usually simple stories or short essays, may be understood as a complex of more-or-less coherently related propositions. The economies by which irrelevant propositions are deleted, relevant propositions inferred, and macro-propositions built, dominate theories of comprehension in this domain. On the other hand, in defamiliarization theory, where the special characteristics of literary texts are acknowledged, exemplary texts are those that present complexes of propositions using various literary devices. The meanings of these texts, such as short stories or poems, are understood only when literary devices such as alliteration, metaphor, and the like are taken into account. Within this domain, economies of comprehension do not dominate; rather, it is the effects of stylistic devices on defamiliarization, feeling, and individual variations in interpretation that are critical.⁶