I realized today that I had embarked on a series of posts about grounding without providing much in the way of introduction. For those who have only read Porter on the issue there will be cause for confusion, since he inverts the terms compared to what is found in the broader linguistic literature.1 Generally speaking, the study of grounding centers on differentiating core elements that advance a discourse from the peripheral elements that flesh it out. Paul Hopper’s “Aspect and Foregrounding in Discourse” is considered the seminal article that got the discussion started. The following introduction is excerpted from Robert A. Dooley and Stephen H. Levinsohn, Analyzing Discourse: A Manual of Basic Concepts (Dallas: SIL International, 2001), 7-8.

2.1 Broad categories of genre

By definition then, genre is culture-specific, and each language and culture will have a bewildering variety of specific genres which are distinctive to it. 2 Hence, any list of universal genres must be more general. In this text, a very broad level of genre categories is presented, following Longacre 1996. Not surprisingly, these general categories lack many of the characteristic properties associated with specific genres; they do, however, retain useful distinctives.

Longacre’s broad categorization makes use of plus and minus values for a set of four features. Two of these features—contingent temporal succession and agent orientation—can be taken as primary, and serve to identify the four broadest categories. CONTINGENT TEMPORAL SUCCESSION refers to a framework “in which some (often most) of the events or doings are contingent on previous events or doings” (p. 9). Thus, Little Red Riding Hood’s arrival at her grandmother’s house is contingent on her setting out through the woods, and the putting of a cake in the oven (in a recipe) is contingent on having first mixed the proper ingredients. The second primary feature, AGENT ORIENTATION, refers to whether the discourse type deals with “events or doings” which are controlled by an agent (one who performs an action), “with at least a partial identity of agent reference running through the discourse” (loc. cit.). Again, Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf are agents in that story; the hearer is a (potential) agent in an exhortation, etc. The four categories of genre resulting from these two features are presented in (5):

(5) Broad categories of genre (from Longacre 1996, Chapter 1)

+ Agent orientation – Agent orientation
+ Contingent temporal succession NARRATIVE PROCEDURAL
– Contingent temporal succession BEHAVIORAL EXPOSITORY

That is, NARRATIVE discourse (e.g., stories) is + agent orientation, + contingent succession, for the reasons discussed above. PROCEDURAL discourse (“how to do it, how it was done, how it takes place”) is +contingent succession but – agent orientation, since “attention is on what is done or made, not on who does it” (loc. cit.). BEHAVIORAL discourse (exhortation, eulogy, some speeches of political candidates, etc.) is –contingent succession but + agent orientation, since “it deals with how people did or should behave” (loc. cit.), and EXPOSITORY discourse (budgets, scientific articles, etc.) is – in regard to both features.

According to Hopper, the most salient information in each genre are considered the “foreground” of the discourse, that which moves it forward. The less-salient information, that which does not advance the discourse, is called the “background.” There are a number of aliases to refer to the same binary concepts of foreground/background. These include “mainline/offline”, and “figure/ground.”

Most discussion of grounding has focused on narrative, so be careful. The claims that are made about narrative will likely not apply to other genres without some modification. Since narrative is agent oriented and concerned with contingent temporal progression, EVENTS will be more salient than NON-EVENTS. Since most narrative events are conveyed using perfective aspect (aorist in Greek, simple past in English), perfective aspect is considered to convey the foreground/mainline/figure of the narrative. The Pauline epistles represent a different genre, mostly behavioral with a mixture of other things. Generally speaking, Paul is building some kind of case to motivate the readers to do something, whether that be supply a gift, change their behavior or attitudes, whatever. It is agent oriented like narrative, but lacks the high value placed on contingent temporal progression. As a result, a different tense-form will convey the foreground than in narrative. Instead of the aorist as foreground in narrative, the behavioral is carried predominately by the present tense-form.

Stephen Wallace provides the following description of how background and foreground  differ from genre to genre, highlighted by bolding:

Included in the foreground, for instance, are the more important events of a narrative, the more important steps of a procedure, the central points of an exposition, the main characters or entities involved in an episode. The background includes events of lesser importance, subsidiary procedures, secondary points, descriptions, elaborations, digressions and minor characters or things.3

There can be a fallacious tendency to think that the background information is unnecessary. Con Campbell makes some helpful comments regarding the importance of background information in narrative:

The mainline of the narrative text is concerned with the major events, actions, and developments that project the narrative in the direction it is going. Without the sequence of mainline events and actions, offline information, such as supplemental information, inside information, speech and so forth, will not make sense; these require the mainline to provide context and to enable the reader to understand how the narrative arrived at the location where such offline material is meaningful. Offline material is contingent and dependent upon the mainline events.4

So in reading about “grounding” in linguistics, remember that background and foreground will vary from genre to genre, based on what is most salient. Longacre’s “broad categories of genre” provide helpful insight into what is most important in each genre.

Foregrounding really has to do with advancing the flow of the discourse. Background information is necessary in many cases, but will not advance the discourse. If you imagine the flow of discourse as movement toward a destination (the communicative objective of the discourse) then we can draw a helpful analogy. The foreground/mainline is the road that you need to travel on to reach your destination. You will only make progress while you remain on the road. You may take a side trip into a cul-de-sac and still be driving, but you will not be getting closer to your objective until you return to the “mainline”. You may even loop back on your path as part of an “offline” side trip. The mainline or foreground is what ultimately carries you toward your goal.

Return to On Porter, Prominence and Aspect

  1. Porter uses the term “background” to refer to what everyone else calls “foreground/mainline/figure”, whereas his “foreground” refers to what everyone else calls “background/offline/ground”. [↩]
  2. According to Bakhtin (1986:80), “no list of oral speech genres yet exists, or even a principle on which such a list might be based.” [↩]
  3. Wallace, “Figure and Ground,” 208, bolding mine. [↩]
  4. Constantine Campbell, Verbal Aspect, the Indicative Mood, and Narrative: Soundings in the Greek of the New Testament (Studies in Biblical Greek 13. New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 116. [↩]