In stylistics, linguistic strategies that call attention to themselves, causing the reader's attention to shift away from what

is said to how it is said. Linguist M.A.K. Halliday has interpreted foregrounding as motivated prominence: "the phenomenon of linguistic highlighting, whereby some features of the language of a text stand out in some way" (Explorations in the Functions of Language, 1973). Examples and Observations:

"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." (Paul Simpson, Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2004)

"[T]his 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/." (David S. Miall, Literary Reading: Empirical & Theoretical Studies. Peter Lang, 2007)

"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 langauge, and awakens the reader, by freeing him from the grooves of clich expression, to a new perceptivity. Poetic metaphor, a type of semantic deviation, is the most important instance of this type of foregrounding." (Peter Childs and Roger Fowler, The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. Routledge, 2006)

Friday, April 18, 2008 FOREGROUNDING FOREGROUNDING What literature is, how it works, and why it is there at all, are some of the fascinating questions that the theory of 'foregrounding' tries to provide answers to. The term refers to specific linguistic devices, i.e., deviation and parallelism, used in literary texts in a functional and condensed way.

These devices enhance the meaning potential of the text, while also providing the reader with the possibility of aesthetic experience. According to the theory of foregrounding, literature - by employing unusual forms of language - breaks up the reader's routine behavior: commonplace views and perspectives are replaced by new and surprising insights and sensations. In this way literature keeps or makes individuals aware of their automatized actions and preconceptions. It thus contributes to general creativity and development in societies. The theory of foregrounding is also one of the few literary theories which have been tested empirically for its validity. 1. FOREGROUNDING: THE TERM The term 'foregrounding' may be used in a purely linguistic sense. It then refers to new information, in contrast to elements in the sentence which form the background against which the new elements are to be understood by the listener / reader. From this point of view the term bears resemblance to other (pairs of) concepts in linguistics, such as theme / rhyme, given / new, frame / insert, and subject / predicate. In what follows, the term will not be used in this narrow linguistic sense, but as situated in the wider area of stylistics, text linguistics, and literary studies. There the term originates with Garvin (1964), who introduced it as a translation of the Czech aktualisace, a term common with the Prague Structuralists, especially Jan Mukarovsky, who employs it in the sense of the English 'actualization.' This suggests a temporal category: to make something actual (rather than virtual). Garvin's translation has rendered this temporal metaphor into a spatial one: that of a foreground and a background. This allows the term to be related to issues in perception psychology, such as figure / ground constellations ( a group of related ideas, things or people). It remains uncertain, however, whether this corresponds to what the Prague scholars had in mind. The English term 'foregrounding' has come to mean several things at once. First of all it is used to indicate the (psycholinguistic) processes by which - during the reading act - something may be given special prominence. Second, it may refer to specific devices (as produced by the author) located in the text itself. It is also employed to indicate the specific poetic effect on the reader. Furthermore, it may be used as an analytic category in order to

evaluate literary texts, or to situate them historically, or to explain their importance and cultural significance. Finally, it is also wielded in order to differentiate literature from other varieties of language use, such as everyday conversations or scientific reports. Thus the term covers a wide area of meaning. This may have its advantages, but may also be problematic: which of the above meanings is intended must often be deduced from the context in which the term is used. 2. DEVICES OF FOREGROUNDING Outside literature, so the assumption goes, language tends to be automatized (a method of painting that avoids conscious thought and allows a free flow of ideas); its structures and meanings are used routinely. Within literature, however, this is opposed by devices which thwart the automatism with which language is read, processed, or understood. Generally, two such devices may be distinguished, those of deviation and of parallelism. Deviation corresponds to the traditional idea of poetic license: the writer of literature is allowed - in contrast to the everyday speaker - to deviate from rules, maxims, or conventions. These may involve the language, as well as literary traditions or expectations set up by the text itself. The result is some degree of surprise in the reader, and his / her attention is thereby drawn to the form of the text itself (rather than to its content). Cases of neologism (a new word or expression or a new meaning of a word), live metaphor, or ungrammatical sentences, as well as archaisms, paradox, and oxymoron (a phrase that combines two words that seem to be the opposite of each other, for example a deafening silence) are clear examples of deviation. Devices of parallelism are characterized by repetitive structures: (part of) a verbal configuration is repeated (or contrasted), thereby being promoted into the foreground of the reader's perception. Traditional handbooks of poetics and rhetoric have surveyed and described (under the category of figures of speech) a wide variety of such forms of parallelism, e.g., rhyme, assonance, alliteration, meter, semantic symmetry, or antistrophe. 3. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

It should be noted that, although formulated in this way by the Prague Structuralists, the concept of foregrounding is not their own invention. In fact it was itself a further historical development of ideas generated by the Russian Formalists, most notably those connected with the device of estrangement (Russian prim ostranenije), as proposed by Viktor Shklovsky. According to Shklovsky, the purpose of art is to make objects unfamiliar, so that a renewed perception of them creates a fresh awareness in the beholder, beyond the stale routines of automatized schemes. Thus for Shklovsky and his fellow Formalists the devices used by writers are not merely there for ornamental reasons they serve specific functions. Hence the concept of foregrounding is also a theoretical one, which was later exported to the West by such scholars as Roman Jakobson, Felix Vodicka, and Rene Wellek. The theory was further refined in British stylistics, most notably by Geoffrey Leech (1969) (On the continuity between Formalism and Structuralism, see especially, Erlich (1965), Fokkema (1976)). Although in its present form the theory of foregrounding has been put forward most clearly in the twentieth century, its roots can be traced back to Aristotle's Poetics (ca. 335 BCE). Time and again, Aristotle emphasizes the fact that the literary text is made according to specific rules, and in this process, devices of deviation and parallelism play an important role. In Chapter 22, for instance, he states that the diction of the literary work must be 'distinguished,' and that this effect is arrived at through the use of unfamiliar terms, metaphor, strange words, or lengthened forms. Through the influence of Aristotle's work from the Renaissance onward, this view of literature has gained a wide dissemination in Western culture. The theory of foregrounding can be seen as a more precise and more systematic elaboration of these ideas. 4. DESCRIPTIVE POWER OF THE THEORY The question should be asked whether foregrounding devices are universal. Few authors are explicit on this point, though in general the assumption seems to be that the answer should be positive. The

presumed ubiquitous (very common) nature of foregrounding devices should not be taken in the sense that they all occur in literature all the time, but rather that various forms of parallelism and / or deviation do seem to form an integral part of the literatures of all known languages, cultures, and historical periods. If that is so, then the concept is a useful tool for analyzing and studying literature, both in the case of individual texts and in general. In a series of reading experiments it proved to be possible - on the basis of the theory of foregrounding - to predict responses of readers to a number of texts. And this was the case regardless of readers' background or training. Research confirmed that readers' attention is drawn by deviations , that these deviations cause readers to process the text more slowly that they cause an increase in affective responses to the text , that they enhance aesthetic appreciation, and change readers' perception of the world outside the literary text (Van Peer 1986; Miall & Kuiken 1994; Hakemulder 2004). There are still several questions that remain to be answered. For example, when readers focus on the way a text is written rather than on its content, would this be a matter of convention or purely an effect that can be attributed to text properties? In other words, do readers process more carefully because they think literary texts are supposed to be read more carefully, or are they somehow forced by the text? Some research shows the influence of convention (Zwaan 1993). Others studies, however, reveal that it is indeed foregrounding that cause such effects (Miall & Kuiken 1994 and 1998). Miall (1995) discusses how some research results in neuropsychology can be interpreted as support for the foregrounding theory. Researchers found that metaphors were rated as reflecting more intense speaker emotions than literal expressions. But contrary to what foregrounding theory would predict, no significant differences in responses to conventional and novel metaphors were found. 5. PROBLEMS All this does not mean, however, that the notion of foregrounding is without problems. First of all, the relation between foregrounding and the evaluation of texts remains unclear; does the presence of foregrounding

devices increase readers' sense of value of the text? There is but partial evidence for the existence of a relationship between these. A more serious problem is the lack of a systematic inventory of devices and their relative importance. There is also terminological vagueness: are different terms, such as 'estrangement', 'defamiliarization', 'deautomatization', 'foregrounding', etc., synonyms, or do they correspond to slightly different psychological processes? In this respect, the similarities and differences with the more general (philosophical) notion of alienation through literature also should be clarified. One would also welcome a more precise description of the way in which the theory of foregrounding differs from other but similar theoretical constructs: Brecht's theory of Verfremdung and similar notions in Surrealism, the Theater of the Absurd, and in existential literature or the notion of aesthetic distance. 6. FOREGROUNDING AND LITERARY HISTORY The concept of foregrounding has been made use of most in textual analysis. It is a useful tool to describe particular characteristics of the text, or to explain its specific poetic effects on the reader. And it may fruitfully be employed to establish a link between purely linguistic description and the functioning literary texts in a culture at large. There is more to the concept of foregrounding than analyses of individual literary text, though, and its importance should certainly not be reduced to this contribution. Foregrounding has also been a useful concept in the study of visual arts and spectators' responses. (e.g., Krampen 1996; Hakemulder in press). In general the term is refers to drawing spectators' attention to some element in the film by means of unusual filmic devices. Wollen (1982) uses the term to define counter-cinema (opposing mainstream cinema); for him it describes spectators' focus on processes of construction of meaning. Examples would be fixed positioning of the camera, and the deformation of familiar objects through filters, mirrors, and extreme closeups. It will be apprehended that foregrounding devices may - because of their very use - lose their defamiliarizing potential, and thus stand in need of constant replacement. In this way history can be viewed as a continuous

wavelike substitution and renewal of the devices and processes by which foregrounding operates.

Stylistics, its linguistic character, its relevance and its importance.

Stylistics could be viewed as a branch of linguistics. It engages in the scientific study of style in both spoken and written texts. It recognizes the relationship between form, context, and content by making use of language. The word style is derived from the Latin word Stylus meaning Reed. Reed is a stick for writing. Later Stylus metamorphosed into style. The word style can be given different meaning and as such it is difficult to give a clear-cut monothlic definition of style but what we should know is that stylistics as a discipline originates from two separate and inter-related discipline and these disciplines are linguistics and literary criticism. The literary scholars and linguists have accepted stylistics to be a worthwhile discipline. In view of this, one can rightly say that stylistics had secured a place for itself in the field of literature and language irrespective of the divers opinions express of scholars.

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As far as definition is concerned, critics and linguists have held divergent views and opinions about its definition. Some of these scholars believe that stylistics has a system and method which could be used to define the specific characteristics of literary words. Some lay emphasis on its methodological approaches. Therefore, among modern scholars there is no agreement at all as to how to define the word style and stylistics. They all presume that they know where style is and they are all engaged in finding a scientific formular to locate it. However, inspite of these differences in opinion, linguistics has not totally failed in giving all the framework with which to work in stylistics. It should then be noted that the domain for the study of style is known as stylistics. Chatman defines style as the manner in which form is executed or the means in which the context is expressed. Style can be used in either a technical or a non-technical sense. There is style in everything human beings do. Style in linguistics is applied to both written or spoken language. There are psycho-linguist who believes that our speech helps to identify our social background, sex and nationalities within the society. The inadequacy of this approach lies in the fact that some people use of language may not reveal their cultural identity. Buffoon gives another notion of style, he believes that style is the man. The sociological analysts believe that a man is a product of the society and whatever he writes must reflect his socio-political experience. From this argument, the man himself is referred to as style. It is claimed that, it is a difficult to divorce matter from manner, that is, no distinction can be made between what a writer writes and the way he writes it. A mans writing will definitely reveal his background. This definition is defective in a way, some writers identities may not reflect in their writings.

Osgood defines style as norm and deviation. A norm is the common practice or acceptable usage in language. It is what is permissible within the rules governing the use of language. For instance all human normal human beings have two legs each. It is the norm and anything contrary to this is a deviation. Deviation is a departure from general order. It is the deliberate violation of the norms. Every use of figure of speech could be seen as deviation. Example there is deviation in the sentence: Colourless green idea sleeps furiously. Following Chomskys selectional creterion, the word sleep is deviant and ungrammatical in the above sentence because it selects an inanimate subject. Moreover ideas have no colour. The contradiction usage colourless green is also a deviation. The sentence is grammatical and it violates the rule of choice. The problem with this definition is that it is difficult to decide what is the norm. Is it the ordinary or the elevated usage? Another weakness is that not all text are all literary deviant. There are some poems which cannot be said to be deviant. Generally, however stylistics could be regarded as the domain for the study of text or discourse. There are two ways of looking at style and stylistics. They could be used in relation to analysis of literary text and this gives us what is known as linguistics stylistics and it has its own peculiar analytical procedures. Therefore, linguistics stylistics could be simply defined as the application of stylistics through the linguistics frames to the analysis of literary text. Stylistics in the words of Widdowson (1975) is the study of literary discourse form a linguistics orientation stylistics, consequently involves with literary criticism and linguistics. Depending on which angle it is viewed from, the choice of words varies; some say relationship between message and medium, content and form, matter and manner, what and how etc. in any case, both the content and form have some stylistics significance. Secondly, there is the style of stylistics in relation to peculiar use of language and the analytical procedure here leads us to what is popular known as language varieties in a circle of language experts.

Principles of Stylistics
There are three major principles of stylistics they are: foregrounding, Norm and Deviation. We shall begin to explain them one after the other.

FOREGROUNDING
This term was first used by a man called Jan Mulcanovsky. By the way, foregrounding refers to the factors of deviating from linguistic and literary norms. Deviation itself is a deautomatisation of familiar linguistic and literary pattern. It means there are certain words we use everyday as if automatic. Foregrounding will then do reversal i.e. de-automatise such automatic words, e.g. University students are unbeautiful. Again foregrounding is used to thematise certain words or linguistic item. In this case, a structure or words foregrounded acquire prominence or significance in a text as a result of making use of certain aspect of the language. Thus, if a writer or a speaker frequently uses adjectives that indicate or suggest vibrancy, and analyst would see this as an attempt to mimic or ape a particular situation being described or presented. In similar manner, the prepondance of lexical item may be deployed to paint an atmosphere of serenity or calmness. In the same vein, sounds can be repeatedly use for the same purpose. It should be noted that there are two forms of foregrounding. They are:
1. Deviational foregrounding 2. Non-deviational foregrounding

The non-deviational type of foregrounding is a structure that acquires a prominent significance in a text as a result of making use of certain aspect of language. Example is such a systematic repeated/or prepondent manner that attracts the attention of a reader; Dr Fatunsi is a lion-hearted chief, Dr Fatunsi is a dogged fighter who never discourages until victory is attempted, Dr. Fatunsi , Dr Fatunsi .., whereas, the deviational type draws its own attraction if the readers attention is drawn by a way of violating the rules and norms of the pattern. In foregrounding there is also what is called prominence. Michael Halliday observes that foregrounding is prominence, that is motivated. So we can have motivated and unmotivated prominence. It is the motivated prominence that goes with foregrounding. If a linguistic item is motivated we say it is significant for meaning and if not, it is not significant for meaning. Therefore, before a particular item/unit can be considered as foregrounding, it needs to be firstly analysed so as to find out the norms in order to discover a prominence or foregrounded structure. Lexical items can only be foregrounded.

Norms
Norm is an established pattern within a text. The norm of language as a whole is solely concerned with linguistic levels of language, such as the grammar, phonology, lexical structure and graphology. There are different types of norms. They are: General norm, authorian norm and lexical norm.

1. General norm:
This means in effect when writing we must observe the norms that relate to that type of text. If you are writing a poem, certain norms must be observed e.g. using verses, starting each line with capital letter, rhyming pattern especially in conventional writing. The Sonnets has a norm that it has to be fourteen lines divided into octave and sestet. In drama, we have characters engaging in dialogue, the dialogue may be spoken or unspoken.

2. Authorian norm:
This is the norm the author has created by himself. Example is E. E. Cummings does not use capital letter at all and he does not use punctuation marks. George Benard Shaw has his own norms and one of such is his lengthy stage directions which can go into stages before the real action.

3. Lexical norm:
This is a situation where a writer creates a norm for himself in a particular work. It is almost the same as authorial norm. The has to do with/way the writer uses words.

Deviation
Deviation is the breaking of rules which others obey. Poetry as a genre is a deviation from the ordinary language, though, despite the poetic deviation, poetry skill has its own rules and norms which separate it from ordinary language and therefore creates its own pattern. In literary circle, deviation is taken as poetic license or writers license and it should be noted that deviation could occur at various linguistic level. We can have grammatical lexical, phonological, semantic and textual deviation. At the graphological deviational level, we focus on the breaking of rules relating to punctuation marks on starting a proper name with a small letter e.g. E.E. Cummings work:

spoke joe to jack leave her alone she is not your gal At the level of phonology, deviation can also occur when you use the sound patterns of language which deviate from the ordinary language sound patterns. It may be to attract attention e.g. instead of girl, you say gal. Rhymy scheme can also be a form of deviation from the ordinary language e.g. Rime of the ancient manner Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lexical deviation At the lexical level, deviation occur when a word is over-use in a line or when there is collocation clash or when a strange lexical item is brought in. for example, the item or lexical item such as allow pirate are peculiar to a particular setting and are used in deviation to the normal use of the word. Deviation can be in form of introduction of new words into the language e.g. If you like her so much why dont you kuku marry him, se you hear her. What happen here is called macaronism which means put in more than one language. The deviation could be grammatical i.e. deviating from the rule of the grammar of a language e.g. instead of saying Mad don you say Don mad. This is for the purpose of the matisation. This grammatical deviation is also called syntactic deviation. Semantic deviation operates at the level of meaning e.g. Three hearty cheers to our eighty year Abiku. The deviation here is semantic because an Abiku is not supposed to live that long (80 years). We also have dialectal deviation e.g. if you put the dialect of Akure into the mouth of an Hausa, then there is a dialectual deviation. Some people can not articulate well such speech sounds as /S/ /tS/. This is provincial.

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