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Hence, “the immediate effect of foregrounding is to make strange (ostranenie), to achieve
defamiliarization” (Miall and Kuiken 1994:391).
In his book, Word Order Variation in Hebrew Poetry: Differentiating Pragmatics
and Poetics (2006), Nicholas Lunn addresses the issue of word-order variations in B-
lines of parallelisms, a poetic device common in ancient Hebrew poetry. In his chapter
on defamiliarized word order in parallel lines, he says:
If pragmatics fails to account for the variation exhibited by parallel lines,
then what is the motivating factor that produces such a feature? We would
maintain that the characteristics of non-canonical B-lines in parallelisms
point us in the direction of a purely poetic manner of word-order variation
(Lunn 2006:105).
In the corpus, constituent order deviation was predominately found in poems of
the Neo-classical style. In some cases, constituent order deviation may have helped poets
reach desired end rhymes, syllable counts and/or meters. A poet may find that while
change in constituent order may produce a difference in pragmatic meaning, such as
indicating that a certain constituent is focal, such deviation may remain within the bounds
of what the poet wants to communicate and may not necessarily be the reason for the
change in constituent order. Such may be the case in examples where end rhyme is
reached by means of syntactic deviation. However, in some situations, a change from
normal word order may simply express a poet’s desire to defamiliarize a word, phrase, or
an entire line of poetry, making it more salient, more conscious in the mind of the reader.
While prosaic word order abounded in free verse poetry, there were still some noteworthy
instances of constituent order deviation.
In the discussion that follows, I provide evidence for various constituent order
deviations found in the corpus. The subject of differentiating between pragmatic
motivations, such as topic and focus, and poetic effects, such as defamiliarization, is an
area for further study.