Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

internal
foregrounding
, works inside the text as a kind of deviation within a deviation.
Moreover, it is clear that foregrounding does not stand still for long and that a 
writer’s craft involves the constant monitoring and (re)appraisal of the stylistic effects
created by patterns in both the foreground and in the background. The concept of
foregrounding will be further explored and illustrated in B2.
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Jakobson’s ‘poetic function’
In a famous paper, that still reverberates in much of today’s stylistic scholarship, 
the structuralist poetician Roman Jakobson proposes a model of language which
comprises six key functions (Jakobson 1960). These are the 
conative
, 
phatic
, 
referen-
tial
, 
emotive
, 
poetic
and 
metalingual
functions of language. Alongside the referential
function (the content carrying component of a message) and the emotive function
(the expression of attitude through a message), there is one function that stands out
in respect of its particular appeal to stylisticians. This is the poetic function, which
Jakobson defines thus: ‘the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from
the axis of selection into the axis of combination’ (Jakobson 1960: 358). This rather
terse formula is not the most transparent definition you are likely to come across in
this book, so some unpacking is in order. As a short demonstration of the formula
at work, consider first of all the following example which is the opening line of 
W. H. Auden’s elegiac poem ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939). A key verb in the
line has been removed and you might wish to consider what (sort of) word would
make an appropriate entry:
He ________ in the dead of winter
There are clearly many items that might go into the slot vacated in the line. That
said, some words, if semantically compatible, can be ruled out on the grounds of
inappropriateness to the context: the euphemistic cliché ‘passed away’ or the crudely
informal idiom ‘kicked the bucket’ are unlikely to be strong contenders in the context
of an poetic elegy. You may instead prefer to settle on a verb like ‘died’, a contex-
tually neutral form which is more in keeping with the poem’s obvious funereal theme.
However, the missing verb is actually ‘disappeared’, reinstated here for clarity:
He disappeared in the dead of winter
The technique of blanking out a word in a line, a 
cloze test
in stylistics parlance, is
to force us to think about the pool of possible lexical entries from which a choice 
is ultimately made. This pool of available words is what Jakobson means by his term
‘axis of selection’. What is significant about Auden’s selection, one word taken from
many possibilities, is that it engenders a series of resonances across the line as a whole.
Notice for example, how the three syllable word ‘disappeared’ creates associative
phonetic links with other words in the line. Most obviously, its initial and final conso-
nant /d/ alliterates with those in the same position in the word ‘dead’ later in the
line. Possibly more subtly, its third, stressed syllable (disapp
ea
red) contains a diph-
thong, the first element of which is the vowel /i:/, the same as the vowel in ‘H
e
’. 
This type of vowel harmony, known as 
assonance
, further consolidates points of
equivalence across the poetic line.
However, there are also semantic as well as phonetic transferences in the line.
Notice how it is the season, winter, which takes over the semantic quality of death and,
when positioned together in the same grammatical environment, the words ‘dead’ 
and ‘disappeared’ enable new types of signification to emerge. More specifically, the
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