On Foregrounding And The Realization Of Communicative Intention

Foregrounding is a basic concept of stylistics. As the development of literary pragmatics, foregrounding could also be considered as a pragmatic concept. Literary pragmatics is a discipline which combines pragmatic theory and literary theory and it uses the method and principle of pragmatic theory to study literary language. So far the study of foregrounding is limited to literary works'stylistic analysis. But the study about the motivation for the writer to use foregrounding and how the reader could obtain the writer's communicative intention through foregrounding is seldom.This thesis studies the function of foregrounding in literary communication. It chooses literary works such as Jane Eyre, A Rose for Emily as materials for study. And it uses qualitative analysis and case study to study on these two questions:how does the writer set communicative intention through foregrounding? How does the reader constructs cognitive context and find the optimal relevance, thus decode the writer's communicative intention? Communicative intention is the starting point of communication. The purpose of the writer to create a literary works is to transmit his certain communicative intention. When normal language could not transmit his communicative intention, he would break the language rule which could be seen as foregrounding to transmit his communicative intention. From the reader's point of view, when the reader meets foregrounding, he would feel defamiliarized and begin to find the optimal relevance which could lead to the writer's communicative intention. While the reader reads the literary works, he is constructing cognitive context. The reader combines the known cognitive context and textual context and according to relevancy theory to find the optimal relevance which lead to the writer's communicative intention.At last this paper draws this conclusion:the process of appreciation of literary works is an interactive process between the writer and the reader. This process is ostensive-inferential model of communication. This paper tries to interpret literary works from pragmatic view and finds out that using method and principle of pragmatics to interpret literary works could help the reader obtain the writer's communicative intention and have better understanding of literary works.