IntroductionThis study deals with an elusive property of discourse, namely grounding or what is more popularly known as the foreground (FG)-background (BG) structure. We will account for grounding as one of the semantic properties of discourse, and examine manifestations of the FG-BG distinction in terms of schematic features (viz. the global organizers of the propositional content) and specific syntactic structures, namely markers that occur in sentence-initial position. We shall apply this theoretical study of grounding in an analysis of English and Arabic short news texts.Earlier research that dealt with the theoretical notion of grounding has depended primarily on narrative and conversational types of discourse. More importantly, it has been quite unsystematic and sometimes confused. Various levels of description have been conflated, reflecting the lack of explicit, adequate, and independent criteria for the FG-BG distinction. Thus, semantic grounding has been discussed in terms of surface structure expression, i.e. foreground clauses or sentences, or in terms of the cognitive level of information, i.e. foreground and background information. Grounding has also been conflated with coherence-another discourse semantic notion.The major thesis about studying that grounding should be defined in terms of hierarchical relationships of semantic importance obtaining between propositions in a text. As a discourse semantic notion, grounding is distinct from other notions and levels of description. We posit that it should be distinguished from other semantic properties of discourse such as local and global coherence. While global coherence organizes high and low level topics in discourse, grounding organizes propositions on a FG-BG scalar structure. Although there are relationships between foreground meanings and macrosemantically important meanings or topics, both notions are distinct from each other in their theoretical basis and discourse function.We will make other theoretical distinctions. So we will distinguish grounding from the more or less prominent ways it is signaled in surface structures. Since one of our intentions in the systematic analytical description is to distinguish different levels, we will use different terms to charac-

The association that has been made between the discourse notion of grounding (viz. the foreground-background semantic structure) and the Gestalt notions of figure and ground has led to equating foreground with prominence -a surface structure property of discourse. Sorting out the terminological confusion, this article distinguishes grounding from the prominent ways in which it is signalled and shows that prominence is the textual counterpart of the perceptual distinction between figure and ground. It focuses on foregrounding-backgrounding as one manifestation of surface organization that makes linguistic structures more or less prominent, capturing the writer's choice of a vantage point from which events and states of affairs are perceived and encoded.

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The phenomenon of a¤ect in language has recently received some attention from researchers who have focused primarily on its lexical expression. This article examines syntactic manifestations of a¤ect in the lead sentence of Arabic news stories. It addresses the question of the pragmatic motivation for the occasional occurrence of spatiotemporal structures in text-initial position. Empirical analysis reveals that marking a¤ect is one pragmatic function that the text-initial spatiotemporal structure serves in Arabic news stories. The importance of certain sociopolitical events is a crucial factor. The lead sentence acquires an emotive value or interpretation as it exhibits the writer's a¤ective stance toward reported events. Although spatiotemporal structures are used sparingly in text-initial position, they manifest variation in their composition-a possible indication of varying degrees of emotional involvement or intensity. Illustrative examples of this phenomenon explain implications for the communication of a¤ect.

This article is an inquiry into the discourse phenomenon of grounding, viz. the foreground-background structure. It explains the place of the phenomenon in the structure of discourse and provides evidence of grounding from short news items. Focusing on the surface structure level of discourse organization, the article examines variant marking of the FG-BG articulation at sentence-initial position. Using English and Arabic news data, the article explicates the grounding-signalling function of entities that appear in that position and shows that Arabic news texts rely on certain prefatory expressions to signal the grounding values of underlying propositions. The study underscores the influence of the cognitive level of information on grounding and its marking in the hierarchical structure of discourse.