The aim of this article is twofold: first, we want to delineate the defining criteria of the foreground. In order to list its necessary and sufficient characteristics, critical observations are made on the claim that the rule of foregrounding is an implicature and that foregrounding only occurs in pasttense main clauses. The issue whether it is (un)boundedness rather than (a)telicity that determines whether a situation belongs to the foreground is also dealt with. The second aim of this paper is to find out whether foregrounding is possible in (nonRestrictive relative clauses in English. Answering this question involves applying the criteria determined in part A to relative clauses. The observations made are based on corpus examples and on the results of an elicitation test.
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Ilse Depraetere (1996) studied this question.