foregrounding 前景化.ppt

Foregrounding 前景化 * * * * Definitions and concepts ? Foreground is a term usually used in art, having opposite meaning to background. ? It’s a very general principle of artistic communication that a work of art in some way deviates from norms which we have learnt. Anyone who wishes to investigate the significance and value of a work of art must concentrate on the element of interest and surprise, rather than on the automatic pattern. Such deviations from linguistic or other socially accepted norms are labeled foregrounding. (Leech,1968: 57). In stylistics ? Foregrounding in stylistics is a term borrowed from the Prague School of Linguistics, which is used by Leech and Short (1981: 48) to refer to ‘artistically motivated deviation’. ? Foregrounding has its origin with the Czech theorist Jan Mukarovsky: it is Mukarovskys original term, aktualisace, was rendered in English by his first translator (Mukarovsky, 1932/1964). It refers to the range of stylistic effects that occur in literature, whether at the phonetic level (e.g., alliteration, rhyme), the grammatical level (e.g., inversion, ellipsis), or the semantic level (e.g., metaphor, irony). ? The immediate effect of foregrounding is to make strange (ostranenie 陌生化), to achieve defamiliarization. Shklovsky saw defamiliarization as accompanied by feeling: he noted, more precisely, that stylistic devices in literary texts emphasize the emotional effect of an expression (Shklovsky, 1917/1965, p. 9). And, Mukarovsky concurs, When used poetically, words and groups of words evoke a greater richness of images and feelings than if they were to occur in a communicative utterance (1977, p. 73). Examples: 1. Sillitoe’s text Now you’d think, and I’d think, and everybody with a bit of imagination would think, that we’d done as clean a job as could ever be done, that with the baker’s shop being at least a mile from where we lived, and with not a soul having seen us, and what with