Foregrounding

Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies that concerns making a linguistic utterance (word, clause, phrase, phoneme, etc.) stand out from the surrounding linguistic context, from given literary traditions, or from more urban 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 (referred to as a 'secondary norm'), or wider such as an entire genre (referred to as a 'primary norm'). Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language (phonology, graphology, morphology, lexis, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics). It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, aid memorability, and/or invite interpretation.

== Origin == The term originated in English through the translation by Paul Garvin of the Czech aktualisace (literally "to actualize"), borrowing the terms from Jan Mukařovský of the Prague school of the 1930s. The Prague Structuralists' work was a continuation of the ideas generated by the Russian Formalists, particularly their notion of Defamiliarization ('ostranenie'). Especially the 1917 essay 'Art as Technique' (Iskusstvo kak priem) by Viktor 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 stone stony. 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 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' (literaturnost').