8) Figure and ground

In focusing our attention on something, we automatically give prominence to some elements of a scene and downplay others. For instance, a sudden noise stands out as figure against the ground of silence. As gestalt psychology has demonstrated, we automatically arrange the elements of a visual scene into a salient figure and a non-salient background, or simply ground. When we look out of the window, we may see trees silhouetted against the sky. Here, the trees are the

figure and the sky serves as the background. When a bird comes flying by and perches on the treetop, the bird becomes the figure and the tree recedes into the background. The figure tends to be more conspicuous, more mobile, better delineated and smaller in size than the ground. It therefore attracts our particular attention and interest.

The principle of figure/ground alignment also applies to language. For example, just as there is a preferred way of seeing the spatial location of a bird relative to a treetop, there is a preferred way of construing and describing this situation.

Thus, it is more natural to say The bird is on the treetop than ?The treetop is under the bird.

Te former description conforms to our normal figure/ground alignment while the latter description might apply to a scene in which a big bird holds a little tree in its claws. If the two entities are of about equal size and prominence, we may switch between figure and ground. But we can’t think or talk about two things at the same time. Likewise, in language, we can speak of either the cinema near the supermarket or the supermarket near the cinema. Here either the supermarket or the cinema serves as the ground for locating the figure entity. English expresses the ground in such spatial situations by means of prepositional phrases.

In the structure of a simple sentence, the entity described by the subject is

the figure, and the entity described by the direct object is the ground. In the commercial transaction scene considered in the sentences, the human participant, i.e. the buyer or seller, almost always functions as the figure, while the non-human participant, i.e. the goods or the money, normally functions as the ground. If there are no humans that are windowed for attention, it is normally the goods that are typically more prominent than the money and are chosen to become the figure as in (f), Te horse cost $500. We may, however, reverse figure and ground to give more prominence to the money, and express it as the figure, as in (g), $500 buys a good horse.

Likewise the events described in complex sentences also divide into figure and ground. Consider the following pair of sentences:

Figure Ground

a. We got married after we had children.

b. We had children before we got married.

Both sentences describe the same sequence of events: we first had children and then got married. In general, the function of a subordinate clause is to provide the ground for the figure event, which is described by the main clause. In sentence (a), having children is the ground event relative to which the figure event of getting married is located in time, while in sentence (13b), getting married is the ground event relative to which the figure event of having children is located in time. These sentences thus display figure/ground reversal and, concomitantly, mean different things.

Foreground and background have numerous manifestations in discourse (ch. 13). In a narration, for example, static descriptions of the characters and situation serve as the background against which the “story line”—a series of bounded events— stands out as a kind of figure (Hopper and Thompson 1980).