Foregrounding and cohesion : theoretical linguistics applied to the study of style in poetry.
Date
1972
Authors
Dunsmuir, David Hempstock
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Abstract
The two features of language use are examined in terms of the relations they establish in poetry, a class of messages where the dominant communicative function is said to be that of calling attention to the message itself, as opposed to a referential subject other than the message.
The features are (a) foregrounding, or emphasis through deviation from normal patterning of the sign-systems, and (b) cohesion, or the unifying of a text by inter-sentence linkage. In poetry, these features do not occur at random in substance and form; their constituents are arranged to produce relational networks at both levels, designed to sustain interest in the poem as a construct as well as in the poem's contextual significance.
Examples are given at the level of form (grammar and lexis, with brief mention of the formal poetic schemes of metre and rhyme), and at two interlevels: phonology, relating form to substance, and context, relating form to situation of reference. Style is seen as the nature of the encoder's selection from a range of techniques establishing contrasts and equivalences in form and (simultaneously) at one of both of the interlevels. An outlined descriptive method is applied to two poems, Dylan Thomas's 'Ballad of the Long-legged Bait' and Gerard Manley Hopkin's 'The Wreck of the Deutschland.'