Manifestations of the Phenomenon of Foregrounding and Backgrounding in "Al-Khidr" By Abu Al-Fadl Badran: Study, Classification, and Statistics

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 مقيدة ومسجلة بالدراسات العليا في قسم اللغة العربية - کلية الآداب - جامعة جنوب الوادي

2 أستاذ النحو والصرف والعروض - کلية الآداب - جامعة جنوب الوادي

3 أستاذ النحو والصرف والعروض المساعد - کلية الآداب - جامعة جنوب الوادي

Abstract

This research aims to clarify a grammatical and linguistic phenomenon, which is the phenomenon of Foregrounding and Backgrounding in "Al-Khidr" by Abu Al-Fadl Badran. It is one of the most prominent linguistic and artistic phenomena that indicates the flexibility of the language and the flexibility of its system. This phenomenon varies and its meaning changes according to the change in context and the need of the situation. Perhaps the phenomenon of “Foregrounding and Backgrounding” is one of these phenomena is the structure of the Arabic language. The interest was focused on it among the early linguists, such as Kaysabawayh, Al-Sakaki, Ibn Jinni, and Al-Jurjani. The phenomenon was dealt with from multiple aspects, and the later ones relied on what the predecessors had achieved by applying the most important findings of modern linguistic studies.
Therefore, it is difficult for the researcher into the phenomenon to find limits that constrains it. The phenomenon was at its beginning  a grammatical one, then rhetorical one, then it moved over time to branch out among the branches of the modern language. It has been found out that the two most important scholars who dealt with the phenomenon in the past are Sibawayh and Al-Jurjani, as they both emphasize the role of meaning in arranging words in a sentence. For both of them, the goal of language is to convey and understand. However, each of them adopts a specific approach in studying this communication, different from the other. The first relies on grammatical rules while the other relies on meaning. Sibawayh was often concerned with meaning, but it remained at a lower level than the rank he gave to pronunciation and structure. As for Al-Jurjani, for him grammar and meaning went largely together to form useful sentence structures for communication.

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