This article examines the way in which aspects of a story may be made more or less prominent for plot purposes through the use of foregrounding and burying devices.The normal expectation of readers is that foregrounding will be used to highlight significant information and that the relatively insignificant parts of a text will fall into the background. Nevertheless, for plot purposes, the reverse may often be the case.We explore this by looking at detective fiction, a genre where the intricacy of the plot is an important, or even the most important, part of reading. In detective fiction, the objective is to confuse the reader about the significance of information in both the foreground and background of a text, hence creating a puzzle which can subsequently be solved in a surprising way. We demonstrate how reader attention can be manipulated by foregrounding plot-insignificant items and burying plot-significant items in the background.
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Foregrounding and depth of processingThe term "foregrounding" was first used in stylistics in Garvin's (1964) For some stylisticians, foregrounding is particularly important as a means of prompting literary interpretations. Miall and Kuiken (1994: 390) argue (following Mukařovský) that although foregrounding is found in everyday language, it is more "structured" in literary texts. This is one notion of foregrounding, but nevertheless there are many non-literary texts that use extensive and "structured" linguistic patterning for rhetorical purposes, such as advertising language, political speeches and, as we will illustrate in this article, popular fiction. We use the term "foregrounding" here to cover any type of language use which may be assumed to prompt attention, regardless of whether it has literary value. Foregrounding in this 3/32 sense relates simply to whether an item is likely to be noticeable or not, and our interest is in whether it has rhetorical significance generally rather than literary significance specifically.For the forms of foregrounding, we include not only those types of deviant linguistic usage that are the conventional domain of foregrounding studies, but also suggest that standard systemic choices (choices in the language system) are important if they have some impact in terms of noticeability. So, for example, it has been welldemonstrated in psychology that information that is not subordinated grammatically is more noticeable than information that is subordinated (e.g. Baker and Wagner, 1987; see A.J. Sanford and Emmott, in press, for a survey of relevant work). These systemic options may not be unusual as such, but may nevertheless direct attention towards one item rather than another.The term "foregrounding" has a degree of ambiguity because it can apply either to the linguistic devices used to create prominence or to the effect of bringing parts of a mental representation to the forefront of attention. Psychologists have shown that foregrounding affects depth of (semantic) processing, the extent to which a reader fully engages with the seman...
