The stylistic nature of the theory of foregrounding in the literary text

Бюллетень науки и практики / Bulletin of Science and Practice

UDC 811.111-26                                    

Salience denotes feature or state of the object by virtue of which it distinctly stands out from other objects against their backdrop. Cognitive salience plays a part in perception, consolidation and retaining information, structuring knowledge, attention and categorization. Salience in language organizes conceptual system that encompasses verbal and non-verbal entities. By virtue of relating to conceptual system, salience deals with all linguistic levels and phenomena [13].

According to Kubryakova, the operation of attention rests upon selective perception, processing and information retention. In other words, a human being consciously pays significantly more attention to certain objects in comparison with other objects [11].

Types of salience

Concepts that are activated, enter current working memory and become in the spotlight of a reader’s or addressee’s attention are normally salient. In cognitive linguistics the usage of salience is utilized in two ways that are “cognitive salience” and “ontological salience”. Cognitive salience deals with a temporary activation of concepts during a speech events. Cognitive units are activated once they are required for speech processing. This process occurs by means of two mental processes that are selection mechanism that regulates a concept activation by means of which the concept invades a person’s focus of attention and is being processed in short-term memory or current functioning memory. A concept is also normally activated by means of spreading activation which is realized when the activation of one concept facilitates and as a result gives a rise to another concept (e.g., “bark”, “tail wagging”, “fur”, “poodle”, “alsatian”, “collie”, etc.). The usage of concepts that are already activated calls for minimal cognitive effort, a high degree of cognitive salience requires little or no processing and is normally activated with ease. In contrary with active concepts, currently inactive concepts are nonsalient [6].

As opposed to the cognitive salience, that is concerned with temporary concept activation, ontological salience deals with more prominent and stable properties of entities in the world. Mental concepts of salient entities are more likely to capture a reader or addressee’s attention in comparison with others and hence are more salient. Hence, ontological salient entities have a tendency to evoke cognitive salient concepts as opposed to ontological nonsalient ones [6].

Langacker also proposes the notion of “entrenchment”. “Entrenchment” denotes the linguistic knowledge that is stored in in long-term memory in “prepackaged” and ready-made format, and does not call for cognitive effort to consciously decode an apt conceptual unit from scratch or encode their conceptualizations in what they articulate [2].

Langacker investigates communicative salience touching on “specificity”, “focusing”, “prominence” and “profiling”. Langacker categorizes several types of salience aka. prominence that are profiling and trajectory/landmark alignment [4, c. 119]. An expression selects a particular body of conceptual content that is named conceptual base. Expression’s conceptual base serves as its maxima scope and as an immediate scope where the portion is put “onstage” and foregrounded as the general “locus of viewing attention”. Within the “onstage” region, attention is dragged to a certain substructure named the “profile”. Hence, an expression singles out one segment as profile stands out as the specific focus of attention within its immediate scope.

Langacker distinguishes another type of prominence that is called trajectory/landmark alignment. Expressions can have identical content, and profile the same relationship, but differentiate in meaning because they make different choices of trajectory and landmark. The most prominent participant is named the trajectory which is the entity located, estimated or depicted. It can be characterized as the primary focus within the profiled relationship whereas some other participant is made prominent as a secondary focus which is named a landmark [4].

Stylistic potential of salience generation

Leech and Short put forward three notions of saliency that are literary relevance aka. foregrounding, psychological prominence and statistical deviance (a function of textual frequency). According to Leech and Short, psychological prominence that implies saliency the degrees and types of which enables a reader to obtain a subjective recognition of a style. The scholars associate literary relevance with the term “foregrounding”. Prominence is seen as something relative since the degree of salience of a certain style as well as the degree to which the reader reacts a certain style of the text normally vary and hinges on the reader’s attentiveness, sensitivity to style and literary knowledge structure and previous reading experience. A reader is required to resort to stylistic competence and linguistic competence in order to be capable of identifying the salient features of a certain style of the text, to comprehend what is conventional and unconventional or striking language means in language. However as opposed to linguistic competence, stylistic competence is an ability which is cultivated in different measure in every individual [5].

The scholars highlight that literary relevance, psychological prominence and statistical deviance go hand in hand “all instances of psychological prominence are instances of statistical deviance”. The relation does not function in the reverse direction. To put it in another way, deviance can be utilized so as to confirm hypotheses about style, however, nothing can be proved by statistics alone [5].

The scholars indicate advantages and downsides of prominence and deviance. “A feature which occurs more rarely than usual is just as much a part of the statistical pattern as one which occurs more often than usual” [5].

Stockwell opines that figure and ground goes hand in hand with the foregrounding theory. According to the scholar, particular aspects of literary texts are normally perceived as more paramount or prominent in comparison with other aspects. To be more specific, some certain creative and striking language means aka. figures stand out against the backdrop of conventional non-literary language elements aka, ground. Normally certain elements that serve as figures are selected for attention, whereas the ground of a visual fiend is neglected. Foregrounding in the text is realized through deploying repetition, unconventional naming, innovative depiction, creative syntactic ordering, puns, rhyme, alliteration, the usage of creative metaphors etc. Utilizing bizarre, unconventional language elements aka. dominants that captures a reader’s attention gives rise to deviations from the expected or regular usage of language.

It becomes apparent that this correspondence between the formal devices in the text and bizarre and creative language means lies in the description of figure and ground. According to Stockwell, it is a dynamic process because language means of the text are “thrown into relief in the course of reading or actualizing the text” [7]. A big diversity of stylistic traits confer prominence on the figure that distinctly differs from the ground [7].

Stockwell holds the view that namely defamiliarizing the literary text, “estranging the reader from aspects of the world in order to present the world in a creative and newly figured way” as well as deviation from established language use are the ultimate functions of literature [7].

Salience and construal phenomenon

In Cognitive Linguistics salience goes hand in hand with construal phenomenon that denotes “the level of specificity and detail at which a situation is conceived and portrayed” [3]. Verhagen contends that construal is an attribute of the meaning of all linguistic means. Language provides a big diversity of ways for categorizing situations, their participants and attributes and the relations between them. To be more certain, a certain situation can be construed in a wide range of ways from a cognitive linguistic perspective [9].

Verhagen indicates profile-base distinction in the operation of stylistic devices. One of the forms of construal consists in comprehending one conceptualization in relation to another by spotting overlapping feature or any sufficiently salient connection. Normally metonymy imposes a profile on decoding one entity by referring to another that is related to it as well as metaphor construes comprehending one aspect of object through another aspect of concept that is incompatible and inconsistent with that metaphor [9].

Croft and Cruse put forward the classification of construal phenomena which is based on Langacker and Talmy’s classifications [1]. This classification incorporates the categories such as

• A.    Attention/Salience

• B.    Judgment/Comparison

• C.    Perspective/Situatedness

• D.    Constitution/Gestalt

Category Attention/Salience encompasses the sub-categories Selection that deals with language users’ ability to select certain facets of a conceptualization and neglect others, It also comprises as sub-categories Langacker’s Specificity or Talmy’s Schematization that concerns the capacity to identify commonalities between distinct phenomena and abstracting away from congruencies, and as a result to organize concepts into categories. In addition, it incorporates Langacker’s Dynamicity that deals with the development of a conceptualization through processing time as well as the sub-category Scope. The second category Judgment/Comparison incorporates subcategories such as categorization, metaphor and figure/ground that was reassigned from Attention/Salience category. The Metaphor subcategory makes this classification more understandable than previous ones. The Perspective category overlaps with the aforementioned classifications and deals with linguistic manifestation of the position from which a situation is viewed and is divided into four subtypes: viewpoint, deixis and subjectivity/objectivity. Constitution/Gestalt is similar with Talmy’s category Configuration Structure, but it also comprises Force Dynamics. Constitution/Gestalt category deals with displaying the conceptualization of a structure of the entities in a scene. These construal operations display the most basic level of constituting experience and giving it structure or a Gestalt [9].

Salience hierarchy

A big diversity of ways of construal by means of language means and expressions give a rise to correspondence of more salient and less salient conceptual elements. Not only is this correspondence analyzed by means of notions “figure/ground”, “profile/base”, “trajectory/landmark”, immediate and maxima scope [11].

Talmy explores lexical and syntactical factors of structural characteristics that bring about varying degree of salience of language elements, referents and context. The scholar primarily investigates configuration structures, perspective point, attention and force dynamics. Apart from the figure which denotes a “conceptually movable entity whose path and orientation is conceived as a variable” and ground that implies “reference entity, one that has a stationary setting relative to a reference frame with respect to which the figure’s path or orientation is characterized” [8, c. 313]. Talmy puts forward a reference frame aka. background. As long as a sentence encompasses “tripartite scene partitioning”, its interpretation is that the combination of linguistic figure object and ground object collectively serve as a psychological figure whereas the background functions as a psychological ground [8].

However, Iriskhanova and Kubriakova highlight that the combination of focusing, ground and background hampers an individual from bearing in mind several focuses simultaneously and does not enable him/her to establish the boundaries of the focus, ground and background [10].

However, Langacker emphasizes that “high and low cognitive salience of an element in comparison with non-salient ones cannot be verified. Owing to the absence of mechanism it is impossible to measure the level of saliency accurately and objectively” [2]. Similarly, Skrebsova claims that there is no point in aspiring towards measuring the degree of saliency of language elements [12].

Kubryakova highlights when performing a speech act, conversationalists are inclined to select lexical or syntactical means that meets the requirements of salience. To put it in another way, they primarily focus on the language elements that are the most significant for both the addresser and addressee at the very moment of speech. Addresser can opt for both fixed linguistic expressions with established salience such as idioms or generate his/her own ways of language element construction such as occasional metaphors [11].