Foregrounding

In English, foregrounding theory is when writers draw attention to parts of their text using language. It is a stylistic term connecting literature and linguistics.

To understand this, it helps to think about the parts of a photo: foreground, middle ground and background.

Our eyes are naturally drawn to the foreground of the photo. So, you might put things you want people to notice quickly in the foreground, leaving subtle things in the background.

In the example above, the sheep is in the picture’s foreground. So, our eyes are naturally drawn to it first.

You can do other things to foreground something no matter where it is in a picture. For example, you can make it a different colour to the rest of the background, or make it the only thing moving in a film.

Text producers can do the same thing with their language. They do this by using linguistic techniques to make some language stand out from the rest of the words around it. Then, we as English academics and students can analyse it through the six microlinguistic levels.

There are two major ways to foreground language:

• Parallelism: repeating words, phrases, language structures, etc to draw attention to that part of the text.
• Deviation: going against the conventions, ‘rules’ or expectations we have about how that text should look and sound. This can then be split into two subcategories:
  • External deviation: breaking the conventions that people have for this specific time, place and type of text.
  • Internal deviation: when the text producer goes against their own usual way of writing.

While most foregrounding fits one of these three methods, there are plenty of cases where you might say something is foregrounded but not be able to fit it into one of them.

How do you foreground things in spoken and written texts?

As I said above, foregrounding is an important aspect of lots of different kinds of texts. You do it when you’re drawing, making films, painting, doing photography and anything else.

Each different form of art has its own methods of foregrounding, though. It’s much more obvious in visual art, but there are significant ways to do it with spoken and written art, too.

There are some very obvious ways you can foreground language in a text. For example, you might choose to use font settings. When you underline a word or put it in bold or italics, it naturally draws our eyes to it. In fact, I use that method right here on my website! It helps me to tell you what the most important words in a paragraph are.

Of course, punctuation is another useful way to foreground language. When you put a word, phrase or sentence in “quotation marks”, you usually do it to show that it’s separate from the rest of your words – whether because it’s a quote, dialogue, words you don’t necessarily agree with, or the name of a text.

When you’re speaking, you can foreground language by your tone of voice, facial expressions and body language. If your tone or facial expressions on a particular part of your language are different, it is going to draw the attention of your interlocutors. They’ll think of reasons why you’ve flagged it as separate from the rest of your words.

However, there are other, more subtle methods that you can use to foreground language. As I mentioned above, you can break rules and conventions through linguistic deviation (the combined name for internal and external deviation). You might also draw attention to language by repeating it (linguistic parallelism).

What are the six microlinguistic levels?

The six microlinguistic levels can help you to analyse foregrounding. It asks you to consider what exactly it is about the language that makes it stand out so much. Once you’ve thought about that, you make it easy to talk about it in your essays or exams.

The six microlinguistic levels are:

• Phonology and phonetics
• Morphology
• Graphology
• Syntax
• Semantics
• Pragmatics

Each one of them is useful to learn. They force you to think about language in different ways. Plus, it makes you consider all the different tools that writers have at their disposal – not just the obvious ones!

You can foreground language through any of those six microlinguistic levels. Both society and the text producer set up rules and conventions around those levels that can be broken in a text for effect.

For example, Grice’s Maxims fall under the level of pragmatics. When you flout a maxim, you go against the expectations of the other people in the conversation (interlocutors). So, we’d say you’re foregrounding your language on a pragmatic level – or just “pragmatic foregrounding”.

On the other hand, anastrophe is when you mix up the order of words in a sentence so that it doesn’t fit expectations of grammar. That comes under syntax. So, in Star Wars, George Lucas foregrounds Yoda’s language on a syntactical level.

The fun thing about these microlinguistic levels is that they act as big umbrella terms for lots of other devices and methods you learn in English. That means that if you forget a specific term in your exam, you can use these words instead and still get the marks for terminology!

Remember when I mentioned bold, italics, underlining and punctuation? Those all fall under graphology. Alliteration and assonance are both devices from the level of phonology, while personification plays around with semantics.

Foregrounding by breaking other conventions

It’s not just the six microlinguistic levels that you can deviate from to foreground things in a text. A text’s conventions and structure often also play a role in this.

For example, a convention of Shakespeare’s plays (and many plays of the same time) is that they are written in blank verse – specifically iambic pentameter. However, he can sometimes break that convention in different ways.

When he breaks the convention, that foregrounds the language to us, making us wonder why the language is different and what it might mean about the characters, situation and dialogue. Here are some examples

• In Hamlet, some of the characters speak in prose. When it’s the gravediggers, we infer that it’s because they’re of a lower class, so they don’t speak as elegantly as the noble characters. When it’s Hamlet himself, we relate it to his growing madness.
• The witches in Macbeth speak in trochaic tetrameter when all of the other characters speak in iambic pentameter. Their language is still elegant and beautiful, but they speak as if they are not part of the same world as the other characters.
• In Romeo and Juliet, the titular lovers sometimes speak in a sonnet. Since sonnets are often associated with love and romance, this makes us see that they are instantly connected to one another.
• Shakespeare usually ends each scene on a rhyming couplet. This foregrounds the last two lines, making us feel a sense of finality. It feels like the conclusion of a scene.

There are plenty of other examples from other text types, as well. You just need to know what the conventions of that type of text are. Then, you can notice when the text producer has broken those conventions and make inferences about why they might have done that.

Why is foregrounding important?

Noticing foregrounding is a really profound, important part of doing well in English – both as a writer and as a reader.

It holds a lot of value for those of you who are studying English at A-level, uni and beyond. It allows you to talk about the text in profound, new ways. The more you understand about foregrounding, the more worthwhile things you’ll be able to say about a text.

On the other hand, it is also important if you want to write your own text – or if you have to as part of your course. It helps you to ask yourself the right questions about your words and edit your work successfully. If you understand foregrounding, you have a better understanding of how to draw and redirect your reader’s attention.

Let’s look deeper into how foregrounding can help you in both ways.

For writers

When you’re writing a text (either spoken or written), you want some of your language to stand out more than others. That will help your text receiver to notice important things about the text and make the right assertions about what is going on.

Or, perhaps you want to slip important information by your readers without drawing too much attention to it. That way, you can slip a Chekhov’s Gun or interesting plot twist past your readers without them noticing! I guess you could say this is the opposite of foregrounding. “Backgrounding” hasn’t taken off as a term in English, though. Maybe I should fix that!

Understanding foregrounding plays a big role in editing your text properly, too. It all goes back to that (slightly ranty) post I made about the curtains being blue for a reason. Any good writer does think deeply about what they’re choosing to focus on in a scene. If you understand foregrounding, you’ll get why and how they do that.

Personally, I love that someone decided to use a term from film and photography in English. It helps me to explain why spending 3 sentences talking about the colour of the curtains might make it important. You’re foregrounding it. It’s the same thing as cutting to a shot of the curtains where they are the most obvious and important thing. Of course, we’re going to assume the curtains matter if you’re giving them such clear screen time. They’re not in the background of the shot.

For English students

One of the biggest issues I find with A-level English students is that they dwell too much on the small, unimportant details.

I think this is something that’s left over from GCSE where students get overly analysed texts. I’ve seen those kinds of books everywhere – ones where there isn’t an inch of space on any page of Jekyll and Hyde. To be honest, that’s probably why students make the “curtains are just blue because they’re blue” argument.

At A-level and beyond, though, the focus isn’t on noticing the small things that no one cares about. Instead, we want you to be able to point out what the writer cares about and what they want us to notice. It’s about thinking about what matters to the writer and reader alike.

Foregrounding can be a big help with that. It forces you to focus on what the writer has put a lot of thought and care into. Instead of obsessing over every single “a” and “the”, you instead have to think about what stands out and why the writer might have chosen to do that.

It’s also a great first step in preventing feature spotting. You don’t fixate on every single thing that you can give a name to. The word “foregrounding” is actually considered terminology all by itself.

What is the opposite of foregrounding called?

The opposite of foregrounding does exist! It’s called ‘burying’.

This happens a lot in mystery or detective fiction, when the writer wants to hide the murderer or murder weapon in plain sight. They want to include the answer to the mystery in a scene, but they don’t want to draw our attention to it. So, they use strategies to make sure we don’t notice what’s right there in front of us.

They might also do this by foregrounding other parts of the language to draw our attention away from the buried information. For example, they could point their reader to a red herring by using internal or external deviation. That way, we don’t notice the significant clue pass right by our noses.

It’s a really clever technique! With it, writers don’t have to worry about accidentally having a ‘deus ex machina’ reveal that feels like it comes out of nowhere. Instead, they can hide it in the text itself so it’s with us the whole time.

Although it can be quite scary, too! I mean, in fiction, it’s quite thrilling when we discover we already knew the answer to the mystery all along. However, fiction isn’t the only type of text that we might find this in.

News outlets and other media companies can also use burying to get us to focus on the parts of a story they want us to. They don’t even have to lie! They just have to draw our attention away from the inconvenient facts with burying. Then, they can foreground the things they want us to focus on, instead.

This ties quite closely to agenda setting: the news can’t tell us what to think, but it can tell us what to think about.

Example from Harry Potter

The Harry Potter series has an example of burying that I think is quite easy to understand:

There was a musical box that emitted a faintly sinister, tinkling tune when wound, and they all found themselves becoming curiously weak and sleepy, until Ginny had the sense to slam the lid shut; a heavy locket that none of them could open; a number of ancient seals; and, in a dusty box, an Order of Merlin, First Class, that had been awarded to Sirius’s grandfather for ‘services to the Ministry’.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

You would never know from this passage that the locket would become a matter of life and death in just two books. The writer adds the locket into a list with lots of other, more interesting things so that we barely even spend a thought on it.

We focus on the musical box because she spends a lot of time writing about it, and it has a mysterious and interesting power. The capitalisation in ‘Order of Merlin, First Class’ foregrounds the award, telling us it’s something very significant. Then, the use of scare quotes in ‘services to the ministry’ also gives us that sense of mystery. Why is it so vague?

In between those two seemingly more important things, the locket is an afterthought.

Disclaimer: I use examples from Rowling’s work because she has a very simple, basic writing style, and her work is well-known. However, I do not support or agree with any of the comments she has made about trans people and women who don’t fit her definition of femininity. I see her words as highly bigoted and harmful to queer people and women of colour in particular. Trans women are women.

Where can you learn more?

When I was making this glossary entry, I used multiple sources to help me get a better understanding of how foregrounding works. If you want to know more, I recommend you check out those resources. Learn from the people who invented the theory or are experts in stylistics, not just me! After all, they’re the ones I learnt from.

Here’s a list of my sources for you to check out.

• A/AS Level English Language and Literature for AQA Student Book – Marcello Giovanelli, Andrea Macrae, Felicity Titjen and Ian Cushing
• The FutureLearn Stylistics Course by Dan McIntyre, Lesley Jeffries and Louise Nuttall at Huddersfield University
• Using Foregrounding Theory as a Teaching Methodology in a Stylistics Course – Dan McIntyre
• Style in Fiction – Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short
• Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose – Mick Short
• The Esthetics of Language – Jan Mukarovsky
• The Linguistic Levels of Foregrounding in Stylistics – Christiana Gregoriou
• Teaching English Language and Literature 16-19 – NATE
• Explorations in the Function of Language – M.A.K. Halliday
• How to Analyse Texts – Ronald Carter and Angela Goddard
• The Language of Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics – Marcello Giovanelli and Jessica Mason
• The Babel Lexicon of Language – Dan McIntyre, Lesley Jeffries, Matt Evans, Hazel Price and Erica Gold
• Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English Literature – Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Tom Furniss and Sara Mills

Please note: some of the links above are Amazon Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

I would have also read ‘Towards a Linguistic Theory of Foregrounding’ by John Douthwaite because many of my other sources recommended it. However, I couldn’t find a copy that I could legally get my hands on in English.

If you know where I can access it, let me know!