Foregrounding and its types.

Decoding stylistics investigates the same levels as linguistics – phonetic, graphical, lexical, grammatical. The basic difference: it studies expressive means of each level not as isolated devices but as a part of the whole text on lengthy segments of text. One of the fundamental concepts of DS is foregrounding. F-g means a specific role that some lang-ge items play in a cert. context when the reader's attention cannot but be drawn to them. DS laid down a few principle methods that ensure the effect of F-g. They are: convergence of expressive means, irradiation, defeated expectancy, coupling, semantic fields, semi-marked structures, strong position, salient feature. Convergence – denotes a combin-n of styl.devices promoting the same idea, emotion or motive; any type of exp.means will make sense styl-ly when treated as a part of the whole unit (the context, the whole text). Defeated E-y. may be found on any ling.level. It may be expressed by unusual suffix, zeugma, oxymoron, paradox…. Coupling. Provides cohesion, consistency & unity of the text form & content. It may be found on any ling.level. The affinity may be phonetic (alliteration, assonance, rhyme, rhythm..) & semantic (use of synonyms, antonyms, root repetition, paraphrase..) & structural (all kinds of parallelism, syntactical repetition- anadiplosis, framing). Semantic field.It identifies lex. elements in text segments and the whole work that provide its thematic and compositional cohesion. Lex. ties relevant to this kind of analysis will include synony­mous and antonymous relations, morphological derivation, relations of inclusion (various types of hyponymy and entailment), com­mon sense in the denotative or connotative meanings of different words.Semi-marked structuresis associ­ated with the deviation from the grammatical and lexical norm. It's an extreme case of defeated expectancy much stronger than low ex­pectancy encountered in a paradox or anti-climax, the unpredictable element is used contrary to the norm so it produces a very strong emphatic impact.