This document provides an overview of linguistic foregrounding and its forms of deviation and parallelism. It discusses how foregrounding refers to drawing attention to particular textual aspects. Deviation occurs when a text violates expectations, and can be external, internal, morphological, phonological, etc. Parallelism introduces regularities through repetition at the grammatical, phonological, or semantic level. Various movie taglines and slogans are analyzed as examples that demonstrate different types of linguistic foregrounding through deviation and parallelism.
4. Introduction
– The theory of foregrounding
– General Concept:
– Foregrounding refers to the ‘perceptual prominence’
– It is an psychological effect generated through particular aspects to catch the attention of
the reader
e.g. use of bright colors than dull colors
manipulation of the size and position of words or objects in a poster for any product
advertisement (designers do so to highlight the particular aspects of a product and
somehow distract the customer from discouraging aspects i.e: patent pending, etc.
The upper half of the front page of the newspaper, within western framework, looks
‘ideal’, thus ‘foregrounded and the bottom half present ‘real’ thus ‘background.’ Same is
the case with the right hand side of the newspaper.
So, consequently, we are lead to read ‘foregrounded’ part more importantly than any
other.
5.
6. – Concepts of Foregrounding in Linguistics term
– Foregrounding refers to a form of textual patterning which is motivated specifically for
literary-aesthetic purposes’ (Simpson 2004, p. 50).
– Talking about aesthetic purpose, concept of ‘defamiliarization is also linked to
foregrounding in this regard as the purpose of all art is to force our attention to the very
artfulness of things.
– Literary text can generate foregrounding… an artistic tone by violating text, world (social
norms), language (linguistic norms) and schematic expectations.
– ‘Schematic expectations refers to the ‘conventional ways of viewing the world.’
– ‘Schematic refreshment’ is the process whereby conventional ways of viewing the world
becomes disturbed and accordingly refreshed. Moreover, schemata vary individually.
– Text schematic violations are ‘generic’ violations.
7. ‘Figure’ and ‘Ground’
– The term ‘figure’ refers to:
– Self-contained
– Well-defined
– Distinctive from ‘ground’
– Moveable in relation of ‘ground’
– Detailed and of sharper focus
– This ‘figure’ is what we call ‘fictional characters’ that are foregrounded on
contrary to the ‘ground’ (background)
8. Forms of Linguistic
Foregrounding
– Linguistic foregrounding can take following forms:
– Deviation:
– Refers to an encounter with something different from what is expected or different from
regulations of some kind.
– Parallelism:
– Refers to some sort of linguistic repetition.
10. Deviation and Parallelism
– Both take place on a number linguistics levels.
– The articles that we are going to discuss, has analyzed non-literary genre; the
writer, Christiana Gregoriou, has taken taglines of various movies, chat-up lines
and advertising slogans.
– Hence it is the foregrounding that persuade people to do things, go ahead and
involve in conversation with a person or to watch a film.
11. Deviation
– Refers to an encounter with something different from what is expected or different from
regulations of some kind. In other words When a text deviates from already set norms, this
concept is termed as deviation.
– Deviation can be of following certain types:
– External
– Internal
– Morphological
– Phonological
– Graphological
– Grammatical
– Semantic, lexical etc.
12. External Deviation
– When a text deviates from norms set outside it in relation to its context, that
deviation can be termed as ‘external.’
– To refer a few examples:
– Tagline of the film Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult (1994)
– ‘From the Brother of the Director Ghost’
• (Unexpected/unique and uninformative)
• Mocking its own film in relation to other, where director’s success is a way of drawing
attention.
– Tagline of the film House of Wax (2005)
– ‘On May 6th … see Paris dies!’
• Humorously advertises the death of the celebrity herself rather than the character Paris
Hilton acted.
13. Internal Deviation
– On contrast to ‘external deviation’, there is ‘internal deviation.’
– ‘External deviation’ is the deviation from ‘primary norms’ whereas ‘internal
deviation’ is the deviation from ‘secondary norms.’
– Primary norms are culture, language, society, etc. specific.
– Secondary norms are specific to an individual. Like, when somebody writes
according to his own particular style and then, he, at some points, deviates
from his own writing style. “…the text has itself set.”
– ‘Internal deviation’ is thus based on some sort of parallelism/repetition.
14. Examples of Internal Deviation
– Tagline from the film A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
– ‘A tale of murder, lust, greed, revenge and seafood.’
– Grammatically paralleled but semantically internal deviance can be seen.
– Tagline from the film Arachnophobia (1990)
– ‘Eight legs, two fangs and an attitude.’
– Grammatically paralleled but semantically internal deviance is obvious.
– Tagline from the film Army of Darkness (1992)
– ‘Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas.’
– Syntactically and semantically paralleled but the last one adjective phrase is grammatically
and semantically internally deviant.
15. Deviation in Discourse Structure
– Autobiographies
– Written on behalf of a real-life in first person narration.
– Dramatic plays
– It takes the form of fictional conversation among imagined characters
– Text that deviate from the sort of discourse situation that is expected of them can
be said to deviate ‘discoursally.’
– The tagline from Armageddon (1998)
– ‘Earth. It was fun while it lasted’,
– The tagline for Independence Day (1996)
– ‘Earth. Take a good look. It could be your last.’
– ‘earth’ being directly addressed, and this is done as if a disaster is actually truly about to strike. The above
Armageddon and Independence Day taglines address the movie’s fictional earth-living beings instead
16. Grammatical Deviation
– As Short stated that due to a large number of grammar rules in English,
Grammatical deviation can be at certain levels:
– Syntactical; unusual order of words
– Taglines are usually in non-standard grammatical form
– Morphological; word morphemes in unusual isolation or unusual combination.
– “Are you from Tennessee cause you’re the only ten I see
– It has also a phonological deviation.
– Tagline from Christmas Vacation (1989)
– “Yule crack up”
– Phonologically and semantic deviation is obvious
17. Semantic Deviation
– Meaning relations that are paradoxical or logically inconsistent, metaphors.
– The tagline from The Big Lebowski’s (1998)
– ‘Her life was in their hands. Now her toe is in the mail’
– Life is not a physical entity to be handed in someone’s hand
– The tagline from The Erin Brockovich (2000)
– ‘She brought a small town to its feet and a huge corporation to its knees.’
– Metaphorical in the sense she conquered it all!
18. Lexical Deviation
– Lexical deviation has two forms:
– Neologism; inventing a new word
– Tagline from The Chicken Run (2000)
– ‘Escape or die frying’
– Conversion; Conversion of a word from one grammatical category to another or
use of a word in such a context where it does not belong.
– Gremlin 2: The New Batch (1990) tagline
– ‘Here they grow again’
19. Graphological Deviation
– Any strangeness of the written form would be classified as a form of ‘graphological
deviation.’
– Strangeness of the written form means:
– Arrangement of the words on the printed page
– Use of punctuation
– Spacing, capitalization, etc.
– For example: The buffalo soldiers (2001)
– “war is hell… but peace is f*#!%!! Boring.”
– Unconventional spellings
– Graphologically deviant but grammatically parallel (subject + verb + complement)
20. Phonological Deviation
– Irregularities in the way in which words are pronounced fall under phonological
deviation
– Alliteration, assonance and rhyme are not only classes of deviation but also of
parallelism as Short has stated.
– The tagline from The Truman Show (1998)
– On the air. Unaware.
– The tagline from The Volcano (1997)
– The coast is toast
– The tagline from Redneck Zombies (1987
– ‘They’re tobacco chewin’, gut chompin’, cannibal kinfolk from hell!’
21. To sum up deviation…
– We came across number of deviations and we noted that analyzing deviations,
it didn’t occur alone rather number of deviations and sometimes even
parallelism took place simultaneously.
22. Parallelism
– “The introduction of extra regularities, not non-regularities in the language.”
– Parallelism is categorized into the following:
– Grammatical
– Phonological
– Semantic
23. Kinds of Parallelism
– Repetition on the level of grammar is called grammatical parallelism
– Repetition on the level of sound is called phonological parallelism
– For Example:
– The Alien vs Predates (2014)
– ‘Whoever wins, we lose’
– Phonological and grammatical parallelism can be observed here.
– Assonance is there /i/ and alliteration of /w/ sound.
– Parallel clauses; pronouns followed by intransitive verbs.
24. Conti…
– Meaning repetition can be termed as semantic parallelism
– The repetition of actual world is called lexical parallelism
– The Wayne’s World (1992)
– “You will laugh, you’ll cry. You will hurl.”
– Lexically and grammatically parallel
– Movie goers encounter a schema disruption here. ‘Hurling’ is an atypical and undesirable effect in
response to watching a film, hence the tagline being externally deviant in mockingly suggesting it is
an attractive one.
25. – According to Short’s parallelism rule:
“in addition to the prominence of parallel structure,
they also invite the reader to search for meaning
relations in term of the parts that are varied.”
– Parallelism has the power not just to foreground parts of a text for us but also to
make us look for parallel or contrastive meaning links between the parallel parts.
– Tagline from The Terminator (1984)
– ‘The things that won’t die, in the nightmare that won’t end’
– Grammatically and lexically paralleled. Structure as well as words are repeated. It is the repetition
of structure (‘the A that won’t B, in the C that won’t D’) that invites readers to find meaning
relations between the A and C pairing (‘thing’ and ‘nightmare’) and also the B and D pairing (‘die’
and ‘end’).This results in a near-synonymous reading of ‘thing’ as something frightening and ‘end’
as something inevitably negative. The words ‘thing’ and ‘end’ do not in themselves necessarily
carry negative associations; it is the parallelism that forces them to carry meanings aligned with
the words ‘nightmare’ and ‘end’ respectively, thereby making the tagline suitable for the action
thriller genre.
