The Role of Foregrounding in Interpretation of Subtextual and Conceptual Information in a Fictional Text

One of the major issues in contemporary text linguistics is the analysis of the cognitive principles of distributing information in a literary text. Literary text unlike other types of the texts holds subtextual and conceptual information which could be encoded by the readers when they identify foregrounded parts of the text. Foregrounding is the type of cognitive principles of distributing information in the text and its main function is guiding the readers in interpretation of hidden and conceptual message of the text by showing some signals (important extracts) to the readers. In this article, the types and techniques of foregrounding are discussed, and their usages are observed in the short story The Luncheon by S. Maugham.