ABSTRACT:

Foregrounding is a linguistic label for artistic strategy employed by a speaker or writer to make the information structure in a text to be outstandingly prominent, such that it readily draws the addressee’s attention for closer study of the semantic value being engendered. To achieve this feat, the lexicogrammatical properties of the discourse are constructed by aesthetically distorting the norm of the linguistic components of the standard language. Hence, this paper attempts to show how normative principles of expressions are flouted in selected contemporary Nigerian poetry in order to make the subject-matter more captivating and reverberating as exposition of creative minds. Overall, this paper reveals that thematisation, as a foregrounding strategy in the selected poems, is used to: emphasise the subject-matter; strike the attention of the addressee, and project contextuality as an inseparable element of textual style.