When tracing the sources of the concept ‘foregrounding’, the essay finds two separate traditions, one in literary studies concerned with literary, or poetic texts, usually narratives, the other in text and discourse linguistics dealing with narratives in general. To distinguish between these two approaches, they are called poetic foregrounding and grounding, respectively. Despite the variety of views expressed in studies of grounding there is some consensus as to how the topic is defined and what its main criteria are. There is some consensus also about the basic problems of grounding research.