ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the interaction of narrative situation, lexical repetition, and a simplest mental attention to a story's developing situation and stream of lexis via mental picturing, from a number of important aspects of that interaction. It emphasizes the importance of kinds of lexical repetition to the focussing needed to enable sense-making, to coherence assessments, to reader-immersion or engagement, and to plot prospection. The chapter argues for a different emphasis than is found in some approaches to narrative an emphasis on situation. The syntagmatic sequentiality of narrative texture, entailing changes that normally are not fully foreseen, continues to present a special challenge to stylistic and indeed text-linguistic analytical methods. The linguistic technique employed in subverting the world in this manner is termed foregrounding. Foregrounding is related to defamiliarization and strangeness, but it is also related to creativity and literariness; and it may take quite different forms in the different major genres of literature, as well as within those genres.
