Figure and ground

In focusing our attention on something, we automatically give prominence to some elements of a scene and downplay others. 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, discourse and newspaper discourse in particular. 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.

The 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, e.g. 44 die in Russian plane crash, where 44 die – figure and in Russian plane crash - ground.

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. Human participant also almost always functions as the figure, while the non-human participant (some abstract notion) – as the ground, e.g. For John Galliano, moment of truth (The IHT, 22.06. 2011)

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

Figure Ground

a. Singapore assailed for barring activists (The WP, 14.09.2006).

b. Singapore breached an agreement by barring at least two dozen activists from entering the country.

In general, the function of a subordinate clause is to provide the ground for the figure event, which is described by the main clause. The given above two extracts construe the same event differently due to different figure/ground alignment.

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