Foregrounding

Theme/rheme structure plays a crucial role in conveying meaning and facilitating effective communication and comprehension. Moreover, foregrounding is an issue that has attracted much attention from researchers and theorists. Several studies have investigated the translation of marked structures of the Holy Qur’ān into different languages from various perspectives, such as semantics or stylistics, but few have focused on foregrounding in English translations by Iranian translators of the Qur’ān. The present study aimed to examine the challenges that Iranian translators encountered in their renditions. To this end, English equivalents of eighteen Ayahs featuring foregrounding were extracted from four English translations by Iranian translators and the translators’ strategies in rendering foregrounding cases were analyzed. The findings revealed that the Iranian translators were inconsistent in their renditions but performed better in cases where marked structures were less complex and aligned with the normative structure of English prose. The translators faced the most difficulties in rendering specification and emphasis, which are two main categories of foregrounding. Interestingly, the translators who had native-like proficiency in English outperformed their peers in rendering foregrounding into English.

Rhetorical figures correspond to what is now called "foregrounding" in linguistic studies. Extra-regularity and deviation are considered types of foregrounding. Based on the concept, and considering the distinctions, Haghshenas makes among literary modes. Safavi, in his book From Linguistics to Literature, separates verse-creating and poetry-creating tools, proposing "the rhetoric of verse" (Badi'-e Nazm), "the rhetoric of poetry" (Badi'-e She'r), and "the rhetoric of prose" (Badi'-e Nasr).The purpose of this study is to examine whether a clear distinction can be made between the tools of verse-creating and poetry-creating, meaning that we believe techniques based on extra-regularity, which operate outside of language, have no role in creating poetry, whereas techniques that operate within language always transform it into poetry. Drawing on Russian Formalism and employing a documentary method with an analytical approach, this study investigates this possibility. The arguments presented demonstrate that, since the concept of form in Formalism is an interconnected structure, separating word and meaning is inherently unfeasible. Moreover, poetry is a unified whole, and the role of each element becomes meaningful only in relation to other textual components. Thus, figures of word can also contribute to a text's poetic quality, and dividing rhetorical figures into "the rhetoric of verse" (Badi'-e Nazm), "the rhetoric of poetry" (Badi'-e She'r), and "the rhetoric of prose" (Badi'-e Nasr) does not appear logically justified. Although it is very helpful and valuable in understanding the structure of rhetorical devices and grasping the connection between language and literature.

This study examines how linguistic style in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath enacts psychological disturbance through formal textual mechanisms. Drawing on Foregrounding Theory, cognitive narratology, and clinical psycholinguistics, it investigates how stylistic deviations—such as metaphor saturation, syntactic fragmentation, referential ambiguity, and narrative disjunction—function as mimetic simulations of schizophrenia and depression. Through a mixed-methods approach that integrates close literary analysis with corpus-based annotation tools, the research analyzes selected passages for psycholinguistic markers associated with mental illness, including deictic confusion, lexical minimalism, and temporal distortion. Chief Bromden’s hallucinatory narration and Esther Greenwood’s affectively flattened voice are shown to linguistically instantiate psychosis and depressive cognition, respectively. The study contributes to interdisciplinary understandings of literature as a diagnostic interface, demonstrating that literary texts do not merely represent mental illness but cognitively perform it. Ultimately, this research offers a novel framework for analyzing narrative pathology, expanding the analytical reach of cognitive stylistics and underscoring literature’s potential to model and communicate disordered mental states.