It Could Have Been A Lonely Night And Ingrid De Kok's Women And Children

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In this essay, the main devices of syntactic foregrounding that can be identified in poetic language will be the subject and I will illustrate them by referring to Silvia Plath 's Child, E.E. Cummings ' One Times One, Minji Karibo 's It Could Have Been a Lonely Night and Ingrid de Kok 's Women and Children First. The main devices that will be analysed are accentuation, creation of hierarchies, shifts of accent, ambiguity, semanticisation and the creation of relationships. Accentuation is a foregrounding device which accentuates the metaphorical and figurative words or phrases in a poetic text, thought the use of syntactical deviation or extra-patterning. The following are some of the devices usually used for accentuation which appear in the above mentioned poems. Displacement refers to when a word of phrase in the poetic text is not placed in its usual grammatical position, for example in Child this foregrounding technique is used in the last stanza. The stanza begins with the negative word not, to accentuate the change of tone in the woman 's emotion towards the child who are described in the poem. Deletion occurs when a word or phrase are deleted in a sentence as a technique of foregrounding, such as in One Time One this technique is used in line 13 and 14 where the phrase, "We doctors know a hopeless case if we see one" is not completed. Repetition is a foregrounding technique where certain words and phrases are repeated in the same poetic text, Women and Children