LSC uses specific spatial means to identify foreground and background information. Foregrounding information refers to highlighting the most salient piece of discourse. The less-salient stretch of discourse, which does not make the discourse advance, is considered backgrounded. The foreground is also known as ‘figure’ and the background as ‘ground’. In most cases, the background provides the necessary context for the foreground. LSC classifiers show the possibility of overtly codifying backgrounding strategies in a unique way because of the availability of an ‘extra’, relatively independent articulator – the non-dominant hand – and the simultaneity afforded by the manual-visual system. Therefore, grounding dependencies may be expressed with bimanual structures. Moreover, the dominant hand is typically specialized in referring to the foreground information, while the non-dominant hand is typically specialized in the background one, though dominance reversals are also possible, as illustrated above. Foregrounding and backgrounding may have a short or a long scope in the particular stretch of discourse. In the following fragment of discourse, which refers to a recipe to prepare bread with tomato, the signer keeps the classifier handshape for a slice of bread in the non-dominant hand all along the underlined part thus keeping this backgrounded information present in the fragment for as long as it is relevant.
dh: bread tomato oil salt leave absorve already, then eat
ndh: bread______________________________eat-bread
‘Take the bread, spread the tomato, pour some olive oil and add some salt. Then, leave it aside for a while so it can be absorbed by the bread. After that, you can eat it.’
(© Santiago Frigola, Delfina Aliaga, Gemma Barberà & Joan Gil 2020. Reprinted with permission from Frigola, Aliaga, Barberà & Gil, to appear)