Amid largely isolated discussions on foregrounding and defamiliarization, this systematic review aims to investigate the interconnectedness of foregrounding, defamiliarization, and refamiliarization, focusing on how they are found to collectively influence readers' or viewers' engagement and interpretations. A total of 45 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters published between 1994 and 2024, selected based on their relevance to the study, were sourced from academic databases such as Google Scholar, Taylor & Francis, Web of Science, and Scopus. This review examines methodologies, types of texts, research tools, publication trends over the timeline, and citation distributions of the studies. Through thematic analysis, recurring patterns, as well as the scholarly domains in which the intersection of these concepts is being explored, are identified. This review provides a comprehensive overview of the current research landscape on the combined study of the concepts and identifies gaps for future studies in the field.
This study investigates the online processing of causal and concessive discourse relations in authentic German sentences using eye tracking during reading. Based on the causality-by-default hypothesis, we examined whether connectives facilitate sentence comprehension differently depending on discourse relation type. Participants read corpus-based sentences either containing or omitting causal (weil "because") and concessive (obwohl "although") connectives. Early and late eye-movement measures were analyzed in a critical region immediately following the connective. Results revealed a robust and sustained facilitative effect of explicit connectives across all reading measures, with faster processing in sentences containing a connective compared to connective-free versions. With respect to discourse relations, the findings provide some degree of support for the causality-by-default hypothesis: Causal relations showed a clear processing advantage at the beginning of the experiment. However, this advantage did not persist as a stable linear effect. Instead, pronounced nonlinear adaptation effects were observed: Concessive relations initially elicited greater processing difficulty but were rapidly accommodated, leading to convergence with causal relations over time. These findings suggest that causal default expectations are highly flexible and quickly updated in response to distributional properties of the input, reader experience, and task demands. At the same time, they confirm a routinized use of connectives in discourse processing.
