fronting

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of front.

   The warehouses fronting the river were converted into apartments.

   He got into trouble for fronting a company that hid the real owners.

   Note

   The -ing form of the verb covers every use of front, from facing (houses fronting the river) and confronting to adorning a front. It also covers the two linguistic uses that gave rise to the phonetic noun and the syntactic noun. The grammar tells the gerund from the noun: the gerund takes a direct object (fronting the object), while the noun needs "of" (the fronting of the object).

2. 2
   nounslanguncountable

   The act of putting on a false front to impress others.

   Like a movie-set storefront: an impressive face with nothing real behind it.

   The whole performance was pure fronting, meant to make her seem wealthier than she was.

   Behind the fronting and the bravado, he was deeply insecure.

   Similarposturing, pretense, posing

   Note

   Slang for performing an image you don't have, whether of wealth, toughness or status. The word carries disapproval: calling something fronting accuses the person of being fake. It belongs in casual speech. In careful writing, "putting on a front" carries the same meaning without the slang, and it keeps the link to the false front the word grows from.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The movement of a word or phrase to nearer the beginning of a sentence or clause than it would normally appear, often for emphasis.

   The fronting of the object gives the clause a marked, emphatic reading.

   In English questions, fronting places the wh-word at the start of the clause.

   Note

   Syntax borrowed the word for word order. Fronting can be a stylistic choice, as when an object is moved forward for emphasis (Beans I can't stand), a move also called topicalization. It can also be obligatory, as in wh-fronting, where English questions must put the question word first. The compound is hyphenated, and linguists speak of "the fronting of" whatever constituent moves.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   The shifting of a vowel's or consonant's articulation to a point farther forward in the vocal tract than a given reference point.

   The gradual fronting of the 'goose' vowel is well documented across many English accents.

   Speech therapists note fronting when a child replaces back consonants with front ones.

   Oppositebacking

   Note

   A term from phonetics and phonology, where the movement happens in the mouth rather than in the sentence. A velar consonant may shift toward the palatal or alveolar region, or a back vowel may creep forward. It works both as a count noun (an accent with several frontings) and as a mass noun for the process itself. Keep it distinct from the syntactic movement of phrases, which shares the name but not the territory.

5. 5
   noununcountable

   A phonological relationship in which a front vowel appears in place of a relatively back vowel in an inflected form of a word.

   The vowel alternation between 'man' and 'men' is a classic case of fronting.

   Germanic umlaut produced fronting in many irregular noun plurals.

   Note

   Here the word names a pattern built into the grammar rather than a sound on the move: foot and feet, man and men. The back vowel sits in the base form and the front vowel in the inflected one. Germanic i-mutation is the classic source, and it is why English keeps these irregular plurals. Unlike the articulatory process, this is a relationship between two forms of a word, not a change in how one sound is made.

6. 6
   noununcountable

   An analogous relationship between the vowel sounds in a dialect relative to the language standard or an earlier form of the language.

   California English shows notable fronting of the 'goose' vowel compared with older varieties.

   The dialect's fronting clearly separates its vowels from the national standard.

   Note

   The same front-for-back pattern as the inflectional alternation applies here, but the comparison is between a whole variety and its standard or its own past, not between two forms of one word. Dialectologists use it as a diagnostic: saying an accent "fronts" a vowel locates it on a map or a timeline. The phrasing to expect is "fronting of the X vowel" in a named accent.

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