Grounding

Brita Wårvik
Table of contents

In studies of text and discourse the term ‘grounding’ is used for the distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded parts of the text. Foreground is generally understood to cover those elements that are more prominent, more directly relevant to the development of the main thread of the discourse than background, which subsumes materials whose main purpose is to support, explain, and comment on the foreground. As terminology varies, ‘foreground(ing)’, ‘background(ing)’, ‘prominence’, ‘storyline’, ‘mainline’, and ‘salience’ can be used as key words in searching for studies of this phenomenon.

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