Foregrounding through parallelism and deixis in hemingway's cat in the rain

الملخص EN

This paper is an attempt to explore one of the stylistic strategies that Hemingway employs in his short story "Cat in the Rain", by which some key literary meanings are encoded throughout certain linguistic features.

To achieve particular aesthetic effects or literary meanings, such features are crucial and given a special attention.

In this respect, Hemingway uses linguistic foregrounding to urge readers to pay attention to two groups of foregrounded linguistic features that stimulate certain literary insights : the orientational features of language, or deixis, and the repeated syntactic structures, or syntactic parallelism.

Consequently, linguistic foregrounding in the story is brought about by: first, concentrating on the recurrent syntactic structures, used in two suggestive paragraphs related to the wife, second, by the subtle and minute repetition of deictic expressions that are remote in terms of tense, place, and even in the social sense, and this would reflect the emotional rift between the wife and the husband.

The analysis undertaken might not be final, however, it may show the aesthetic functions which might be ascribed to foregrounding as a stylistic strategy that enhances certain artistically relevant linguistic features.