A Comparative-Linguistic Analysis of Foregrounding in Persian and French Poetry

A literary work is a piece of writing in which the conventional language is decomposed through the methods applied by the poet so that a defamiliarized language with a new system is created. The process is often called foregrounding. Structuralists consider deviation as one of the most efficient ways to create foregrounding in poetic language. This poetic device is especially observed in the works of modern Persian poets though it can also be traced in classical literature as well. In modern French poetry, on the other hand, after the romanticism and symbolism, many poets got inclined to use deviationa as a means for creating a new and different poetic language. A comparison of these works in Persian and French can show similarities in orthographic, semantic, and stylistic deviation between the two. The present paper compares Persian and French poetry focusing on such kinds of deviation.