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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.Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007) Style in Fiction (2nd ed.) Pearson Education Ltd. It is "the 'throwing into relief' of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language."Wales, K. (2001) Dictionary of Stylistics (2nd ed.) Pearson Education Ltd. p157 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.Leech, G. (1969) A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. Longman 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'Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007) Style in Fiction (2nd ed.) Pearson Education Ltd.), or wider such as an entire genre (referred to as a 'primary norm'Leech, G. and Short, M. (2007) Style in Fiction (2nd ed.) Pearson Education Ltd.). Foregrounding can occur on all levels of languageSimpson, p (2004) "Stylistics, A Resource Book". London: Routledge (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.
''[https://books.google.com/books?id=c9a9nhXQUKEC&dq=The%20Prague%20School%20and%20Theories%20of%20Structure&pg=PA196 The Prague School and Theories of Structure]'' p.196 footnote 4.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').
Firstly, most of the poem deviates from 'normal' language (primary deviation). In addition, there is secondary deviation in that the penultimate line is unexpectedly different from the rest of the poem. , adverts and 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 (parallelism) and the third one starts out as similar, but our expectations are thwarted when it turns out different in end (deviation).
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