Foregrounding

The title of 'A grief ago' is doubly foregrounded. Grief is an emotional word rather than a marker of time (such as week or day), and so appears grammatically incorrect. The grammatical inconsistency makes the word stand out. Dylan Thomas asks us to think about measuring time through emotions. Foregrounding, however, is not as simple as contrasting a figure with its background. Specific words in literature are also used to show contrast and estrangement.

Foregrounding techniques

• The foregrounding techniques include any stylistic distortion of some sort, 'either through an aspect of the text which deviates from a linguistic norm or, alternatively, where an aspect of the text is brought to the fore through repetition or parallelism.'¹( Azam Esmaeili, 2013). Parallelism and deviation are used to call your attention to the strangeness of a word or a character's actions in a literary work. Foregrounding is achieved by these techniques.
• Tip: Have you noticed the way this article uses different colours or words in italics and bold to emphasise words? That is foregrounding.
• The differences between foregrounding techniques, parallelism, and deviation are highlighted in David S. Miall and Don Kuiken's table2 below:

Fig. 1 - An extract from Miall and Kuiken's table of foregrounding techniques.

Parallelism

• Parallelism repeats content with unexpected regularity. It is the repetition of sounds, meanings, structures, and grammatical elements in writing and speaking to emphasise relations between aspects of the text. Sometimes, parallelism appears in single words which have slight variations of meaning such as 'bend' and 'curve', or 'climb' and 'ascent' for thematic emphasis. At other times, it is a literary device that creates parallel positions between opposite ideas. Parallelism can be inverted for stronger emphasis in sentences and plots.

Example