Foregrounding in Turkish Poetry as a Stylistic Expression

Foregrounding is one of the ways in poetry to influence the meaning patterns. Those linguistic categories foregrounded by poets may occur different linguistic levels such as phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Foregrounding is defined as follows: “(Foregrounding) is realized through the use of a linguistic unit in a position other than its conventional position in a sentence or in narration. The other way to realize foregrounding is achieved through emphasizing a particular linguistic unit. The process of emphasizing is again created through the use of any grammatical unit in a non-conventional position” (Özünlü, 2001, p. 74). Therefore, the analysis of foregrounded units provides us with a significant insight about the meaning patterns of poems. Furthermore, foregrounding may lead to repetitions and deviations in the language of poems. The most frequent examples for rhetoric are foregrounding and analogy. This study deals with the analysis of foregrounding in poems that include the examples from Classical Turkish Poetry (Divan Poetry) as well as from Modern Turkish Poetry.