FOREGROUNDING AND FRAMING AS DISCOURSE STRATEGIES IN POLITICAL DEBATE A QUALITATIVE DISCOURSE-ANALYTIC STUDY OF THE FORM–MEANING INTERFACE

Political debate is a high-stakes, adversarial genre in which candidates compete not only over policy but over the very terms in which issues are understood. Two concepts developed in largely separate traditions bear directly on this contest: foregrounding, the stylistic notion of motivated linguistic prominence, and framing, the communication-theoretic notion of selection and salience. This study examines how the two interact, arguing that foregrounding functions as a principal linguistic mechanism through which frames are made salient in debate talk. Adopting a qualitative discourse-analytic design that combines stylistic and framing-oriented analysis, it examines a purposive sample of exchanges from publicly documented United States presidential and vice-presidential general-election debates (1976–2020). The analysis identifies a recurrent repertoire of foregrounding devices — syntactic parallelism, marked interrogatives, lexical repetition, semantic reversal, and violations of turn-taking — and shows how each is recruited to entrench particular frames, including problem-definition, moral, and self–other frames. The findings indicate that in the real-time, co-constructed environment of debate, form-level prominence and meaning-level construal are tightly coupled: memorable debate moments typically arise where a foregrounding device and a framing move coincide. The study extends stylistic foregrounding beyond its traditional literary domain and specifies the linguistic realisation of framing, with implications for political communication and critical language awareness.