Grammatische Mittel im Vordergrund. Pronomen, die koordinierende Konjunktion und, die Negativpartikel nicht als Vehikel ambiger Poetizität

In order to describe how “literary reading” proceeds, cognitive poetics makes a distinction within formal signs between “backgrounding elements”, which act as agents of automatic reading, and “foregrounding elements”, which require a more complex process of text elaboration and comprehension of the text meaning. To the first group of background elements belong all familiar words and signs compatible with normal use and expectation. This article aims to show how function words, i.e. ordinary words with limited meaning which seem to be natural candidates to serve as background elements, can express ambiguous relations, thus fulfilling a „poetic function“. The article deals with grammatical means of the German language: personal pronouns, the coordinating conjunction und, the negative particle nicht.