试析ConcernsEssentialConcernsofStylistics:StyleasForegrounding
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Abstract：Objective: to he a better understanding of foregrounding applied in literary style. Methods: make an analysis of foregrounding applied in literary style from these aspects: concept, relation between prominence (psychological saliency) and literary relevance (foregrounding). Results: foregrounding has four functions in the analysis of literary texts. Conclusion: foregrounding is an important phenomenon, which cannot be excluded from the essential concerns of stylistics in general because stylistics is that part of linguistics which pays special attention to the most conscious and complex use of language in literature.
Key words：foregrounding; stylistics; literary style; prominence
1672-1578（2013)01-0012-02
As far as stylistics is concerned, foregrounding tends to be more cl源于：论文 范文www.618jyw.com
osely involved in literary style with that of poetry in particular. Still, foregrounding is an important phenomenon, which cannot be excluded from the essential concerns of stylistics in general because stylistics is that part of linguistics which pays special attention to the most conscious and complex use of language in literature (Turner, 1973: 7).
1 The Concept of Style as Foregrounding
The concept of style as foregrounding was applied to literature first by the pre-war Prague School linguists and literary critics, such as Mukarǒvsky，to refer to the unexpected departures from the accepted norms. The norms of the language are in this dimension of analysis regarded as a ‘background’, against features which are prominent because of their abnormality are placed in focus (Leech, 1988). The proponents of the view of style as foregrounding extended the concept to include both the deviant features and those linguistic phenomena which are not deviant, but nevertheless striking. This is explained in Short’s article“Who is stylistics”: “He can make choices both inside and outside the language system. Choices outside the language system are deviant and thus produce foregrounding. Overregularity of a particular choice within the system (e.g. paralleli) also produces foregrounding. ”(王守元，2000：18-19) To look at this point from another perspective, we may say that foregrounding could be qualitative, i.e. deviation from the language code itself, or it may simply be quantitative, i.e. deviance from some expected frequency(Leech and Short, 2001: 48). Based on these explanations some would say that deviation is the means while foregrounding is the end (王佐良、丁往道，1987：418). To link the means to the end, we may say that the term foregrounding actually describes the process or the means by which language forms are drawn to the attention of the reader or the hearer as an effect or an end in other words.2 Role of Foregrounding
2.1 Concepts of Prominence and Literary Relevance
In order to he a better understanding of the role of foregrounding, another two terms may be introduced here, i.e. prominence and literary relevance. Related to foregrounding, prominence is a psychological notion: Halliday defines it simply as ‘the general name for the phenomenon of linguistic highlighting, whereby some linguistic feature stands out in some way’. We assume that prominence of various degrees provides the basis for a reader’s subjective recognition of a style.Halliday distinguished prominence from literary ‘relevance’, which he calls ‘value in the game’. Like Halliday, we shall associate literary relevance with the Prague School notion of foregrounding, or artistically motivated deviation (Leech and Short, 2001: 48). According to Halliday, a feature that is brought into prominence will be “foregrounded” only if it relates to the meaning of the text as a whole. Of course, this is a functional viewpoint. Where linguistic functions are relevant to the interpretation of a work, the prominence will appear as motivated (董莉，2005：14).
2.2 Relation between Prominence (Psychological Saliency) and Literary Relevance (foregrounding)
The relation between prominence (psychological saliency) and literary relevance (foregrounding) is not a one-to-one match. Prominence, which is the basis for our sense of the particularity of a style, also provides the condition for recognition that a style is being used for a particular literary end: that it has a ‘value in the game’. But there is an additional condition: we should be able to see a prominent feature of style as forming a significant relationship with other features of style, in an artistically coherent pattern of choice (Leech and Short, 2001: 50).
Generally speaking, there are two types of prominence, one of which is negative, a departure from a norm; the other is positive, and is the attainment or the establishment of a norm. Halliday calls the former as “incongruity” and the latter as “deflection”, a statistical departure from some expected pattern of freque源于：论文例文www.618jyw.com
ncy. The former stresses qualitative deviations; the latter stresses quantitative deviations, i.e. “in the circumstance a writer temporarily renounces his permitted freedom of choice, introducing uniformity where there would normally be diversity.”(董莉，2005：13)In one case ‘attainment of a norm’ will mean style borrowing: the approximation to some external norm as a ‘disguise’ or at least as a point of reference. In another case it will mean that the writer creates his own special kind of language (Leech and Short, 2001: 54).The norm which is ‘attained’ by stylistic consistency in a text might be called a secondary norm, since it is established by deviance from the primary(relative) norms which determine our more general expectations of language. The recognition that a text may set up its own secondary norms leads to a further conclusion, that features of language within that text may depart from the norms of the text itself: that is, they may ‘stand out’ against the background of what the text has led us toexpect. This is the phenomenon of internal deviation, which, although it is most striking in poetry, may equally well be observed in prose style. Internal deviation explains the prominence, not uncommon in prose fiction, of an ordinary, even banal piece of language which seems to gain its impact from the context in which it is found (Leech and Short, 2001: 55).
As for internal deviation mentioned above, it has something to do with the two complementary means of ‘foregrounding’ in literature―deviation and paralleli (or syntagmatic foregrounding). Deviation falls into two categories, i.e. internal deviation (or tertiary deviation) and external deviation, which could be further divided into determinate deviation (including secondary and paradigmatic deviation) and statistical deviation. These four types of foregrounding, i.e. internal deviation, determinate deviation, statistical deviation and paralleli, can be reflected in different levels of language structures, such as phonological, graphological, lexical, grammatical, and semantic levels. Besides, different effects may be produced by means of cohesion and density of different types of foregrounding (邓仁华，2004) .
3 Functions of Foregrounding in the Analysis of Literary Texts
The last part of the essay would be devoted to the functions of foregrounding in the analysis of literary texts. The term foregrounding may be interpreted as a concept in pragmatics. It refers to the dynamic interaction among the author, the (literary) discourse, and the reader. Foregrounding plays an important part in the analysis of literary text, especially poetry. The functions of foregrounding may be summarized as follows.
First, foregrounding can reinforce the language effect. Since the poems are relatively short, the poets would transcend the normal communicative recourses of his tongue in order to reinforce the language effect and enrich the meaning of the poems. The reinforced effe摘自：毕业论文格式下载www.618jyw.com
ct can be realized at different levels. Often a stylistic effect can be produced by just a slight shift in syntactic structure. (Thorne, 1981)Second, foregrounding is one of the basic elements of poetry. According to Mukarǒvsky, “The function of poetic language consists in the maximum foregrounding of the utterance.” More than this, “In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.”
Third, foregrounding is required for the appreciation 源于：免费论文查重站www.618jyw.com
of poetry. Mukarǒvsky once pointed out that the key function of art is to provide people with a fresh view of the world though defamiliarization or estrangement (foregrounding). Poetry is definitely a form of art, and thus foregrounding is highly called for in poetry.
Fourth, foregrounding facilitates the understanding of the poems. On the one hand, foregrounded materials will guide the reader to understand and evaluate the discourses. On the other hand, the readers will look for those features to meet their own aesthetic needs (邓仁华，2004) . Presented above is a summary of what is considered as foregrounding in stylistic analysis.
Bibliography：
Leech, Geoffrey N. “This Bread I Break” ― Language and Interpretation[M]. 上海外语教育出版社，1988.
Leech, Geoffrey N. and Michael H. Short. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose[M]. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001.
[3]Thorne, J. P. “Generative grammar and stylistic analysis”, in Essays in Modern Stylistics edited by Donald C. Freeman. London and New York: Methuen & Co. Ltd. 1981.
[4]Turner, G. W. Stylistics. Penguin Books, 1973.
[5]邓仁华. “前景化”概念的演变及其对文学文本解析的功用[J].上海外语教育出版社，2004.
[6]董莉编著.英语文体学理论与实践[J].电子工业大学出版社,2005.
[7]王守元.英语文体学要略[M]. 山东大学出版社，2000.
[8]王佐良,丁往道主编.英语文体学引论[M].外语教学与研究出版社，1987.
作者简介：刘丽艳，硕士研究生，讲师，主要从事外国语言学及应用语言学研究。
Key words：foregrounding; stylistics; literary style; prominence
1672-1578（2013)01-0012-02
As far as stylistics is concerned, foregrounding tends to be more cl源于：论文 范文www.618jyw.com
osely involved in literary style with that of poetry in particular. Still, foregrounding is an important phenomenon, which cannot be excluded from the essential concerns of stylistics in general because stylistics is that part of linguistics which pays special attention to the most conscious and complex use of language in literature (Turner, 1973: 7).
1 The Concept of Style as Foregrounding
The concept of style as foregrounding was applied to literature first by the pre-war Prague School linguists and literary critics, such as Mukarǒvsky，to refer to the unexpected departures from the accepted norms. The norms of the language are in this dimension of analysis regarded as a ‘background’, against features which are prominent because of their abnormality are placed in focus (Leech, 1988). The proponents of the view of style as foregrounding extended the concept to include both the deviant features and those linguistic phenomena which are not deviant, but nevertheless striking. This is explained in Short’s article“Who is stylistics”: “He can make choices both inside and outside the language system. Choices outside the language system are deviant and thus produce foregrounding. Overregularity of a particular choice within the system (e.g. paralleli) also produces foregrounding. ”(王守元，2000：18-19) To look at this point from another perspective, we may say that foregrounding could be qualitative, i.e. deviation from the language code itself, or it may simply be quantitative, i.e. deviance from some expected frequency(Leech and Short, 2001: 48). Based on these explanations some would say that deviation is the means while foregrounding is the end (王佐良、丁往道，1987：418). To link the means to the end, we may say that the term foregrounding actually describes the process or the means by which language forms are drawn to the attention of the reader or the hearer as an effect or an end in other words.2 Role of Foregrounding
2.1 Concepts of Prominence and Literary Relevance
In order to he a better understanding of the role of foregrounding, another two terms may be introduced here, i.e. prominence and literary relevance. Related to foregrounding, prominence is a psychological notion: Halliday defines it simply as ‘the general name for the phenomenon of linguistic highlighting, whereby some linguistic feature stands out in some way’. We assume that prominence of various degrees provides the basis for a reader’s subjective recognition of a style.Halliday distinguished prominence from literary ‘relevance’, which he calls ‘value in the game’. Like Halliday, we shall associate literary relevance with the Prague School notion of foregrounding, or artistically motivated deviation (Leech and Short, 2001: 48). According to Halliday, a feature that is brought into prominence will be “foregrounded” only if it relates to the meaning of the text as a whole. Of course, this is a functional viewpoint. Where linguistic functions are relevant to the interpretation of a work, the prominence will appear as motivated (董莉，2005：14).
2.2 Relation between Prominence (Psychological Saliency) and Literary Relevance (foregrounding)
The relation between prominence (psychological saliency) and literary relevance (foregrounding) is not a one-to-one match. Prominence, which is the basis for our sense of the particularity of a style, also provides the condition for recognition that a style is being used for a particular literary end: that it has a ‘value in the game’. But there is an additional condition: we should be able to see a prominent feature of style as forming a significant relationship with other features of style, in an artistically coherent pattern of choice (Leech and Short, 2001: 50).
Generally speaking, there are two types of prominence, one of which is negative, a departure from a norm; the other is positive, and is the attainment or the establishment of a norm. Halliday calls the former as “incongruity” and the latter as “deflection”, a statistical departure from some expected pattern of freque源于：论文例文www.618jyw.com
ncy. The former stresses qualitative deviations; the latter stresses quantitative deviations, i.e. “in the circumstance a writer temporarily renounces his permitted freedom of choice, introducing uniformity where there would normally be diversity.”(董莉，2005：13)In one case ‘attainment of a norm’ will mean style borrowing: the approximation to some external norm as a ‘disguise’ or at least as a point of reference. In another case it will mean that the writer creates his own special kind of language (Leech and Short, 2001: 54).The norm which is ‘attained’ by stylistic consistency in a text might be called a secondary norm, since it is established by deviance from the primary(relative) norms which determine our more general expectations of language. The recognition that a text may set up its own secondary norms leads to a further conclusion, that features of language within that text may depart from the norms of the text itself: that is, they may ‘stand out’ against the background of what the text has led us toexpect. This is the phenomenon of internal deviation, which, although it is most striking in poetry, may equally well be observed in prose style. Internal deviation explains the prominence, not uncommon in prose fiction, of an ordinary, even banal piece of language which seems to gain its impact from the context in which it is found (Leech and Short, 2001: 55).
As for internal deviation mentioned above, it has something to do with the two complementary means of ‘foregrounding’ in literature―deviation and paralleli (or syntagmatic foregrounding). Deviation falls into two categories, i.e. internal deviation (or tertiary deviation) and external deviation, which could be further divided into determinate deviation (including secondary and paradigmatic deviation) and statistical deviation. These four types of foregrounding, i.e. internal deviation, determinate deviation, statistical deviation and paralleli, can be reflected in different levels of language structures, such as phonological, graphological, lexical, grammatical, and semantic levels. Besides, different effects may be produced by means of cohesion and density of different types of foregrounding (邓仁华，2004) .
3 Functions of Foregrounding in the Analysis of Literary Texts
The last part of the essay would be devoted to the functions of foregrounding in the analysis of literary texts. The term foregrounding may be interpreted as a concept in pragmatics. It refers to the dynamic interaction among the author, the (literary) discourse, and the reader. Foregrounding plays an important part in the analysis of literary text, especially poetry. The functions of foregrounding may be summarized as follows.
First, foregrounding can reinforce the language effect. Since the poems are relatively short, the poets would transcend the normal communicative recourses of his tongue in order to reinforce the language effect and enrich the meaning of the poems. The reinforced effe摘自：毕业论文格式下载www.618jyw.com
ct can be realized at different levels. Often a stylistic effect can be produced by just a slight shift in syntactic structure. (Thorne, 1981)Second, foregrounding is one of the basic elements of poetry. According to Mukarǒvsky, “The function of poetic language consists in the maximum foregrounding of the utterance.” More than this, “In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication into the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the services of communication but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself.”
Third, foregrounding is required for the appreciation 源于：免费论文查重站www.618jyw.com
of poetry. Mukarǒvsky once pointed out that the key function of art is to provide people with a fresh view of the world though defamiliarization or estrangement (foregrounding). Poetry is definitely a form of art, and thus foregrounding is highly called for in poetry.
Fourth, foregrounding facilitates the understanding of the poems. On the one hand, foregrounded materials will guide the reader to understand and evaluate the discourses. On the other hand, the readers will look for those features to meet their own aesthetic needs (邓仁华，2004) . Presented above is a summary of what is considered as foregrounding in stylistic analysis.
Bibliography：
Leech, Geoffrey N. “This Bread I Break” ― Language and Interpretation[M]. 上海外语教育出版社，1988.
Leech, Geoffrey N. and Michael H. Short. Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose[M]. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2001.
[3]Thorne, J. P. “Generative grammar and stylistic analysis”, in Essays in Modern Stylistics edited by Donald C. Freeman. London and New York: Methuen & Co. Ltd. 1981.
[4]Turner, G. W. Stylistics. Penguin Books, 1973.
[5]邓仁华. “前景化”概念的演变及其对文学文本解析的功用[J].上海外语教育出版社，2004.
[6]董莉编著.英语文体学理论与实践[J].电子工业大学出版社,2005.
[7]王守元.英语文体学要略[M]. 山东大学出版社，2000.
[8]王佐良,丁往道主编.英语文体学引论[M].外语教学与研究出版社，1987.
作者简介：刘丽艳，硕士研究生，讲师，主要从事外国语言学及应用语言学研究。
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