Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies concerning making a linguistic utterance stand out from the surrounding linguistic context, from given literary traditions or from more general world knowledge. It is "the 'throwing into relief' of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language." There are two main types of foregrounding: parallelism and deviation. Parallelism can be described as unexpected regularity, while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity. As the definition of foregrounding indicates, these are relative concepts. Something can only be unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular context. This context can be relatively narrow, such as the immediate textual surroundings or wider such as an entiregenre. Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language. It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, to aid memorability and/or to invite interpretation.
Origin
The term originated in English through the translation by Paul Garvin of the Czechaktualisace, borrowing the terms from Jan Mukařovský of the Prague school of the 1930s. The work of the Prague Structuralists was itself a continuation of the ideas generated by the Russian Formalists, particularly their notion of Defamiliarization. Especially the 1917 essay 'Art as Technique' by Victor Shklovsky proved to be highly influential in laying the basis of an anthropological theory of literature. To quote from his essay: "And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stonestony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." It took several decades before the Russian Formalists' work was discovered in the West, but in the 1960 some British stylisticians, notably Geoffrey Leech and Roger Fowler, established the notion of 'foregrounding' in the linguistically oriented analysis of literature. Soon a plethora of studies investigated foregrounding features in a multitude of texts, demonstrating its ubiquity in a large variety of literary traditions. These analyses were seen as evidence that there was a special literary register, which was called, also after the Russian Formalists, 'literariness'.
Example
For example, the last line of a poem with a consistent metre may be foregrounded by changing the number of syllables it contains. This would be an example of a deviation from a secondary norm. In the following poem by E. E. Cummings, there are two types of deviation: Firstly, most of the poem deviates from 'normal' language. In addition, there is secondary deviation in that the penultimate line is unexpectedly different from the rest of the poem. Nursery rhymes, adverts and slogans often exhibit parallelism in the form of repetition and rhyme, but parallelism can also occur over longer texts. For example, jokes are often built on a mixture of parallelism and deviation. They often consist of three parts or characters. The first two are very similar and the third one starts out as similar, but our expectations are thwarted when it turns out different in end.
