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NEWS HEADLINES: A CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS
Abstract
Headlines, which are generally more available to readers than articles, were analyzed from the following media: BBC, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Independent, and The Guardian on the general topic “Education”, - basically, from the linguistic perspective. It was found that newspaper headlines tend to be longer (10-11 words, on average; and certain headlines reach the length of 17-19 words), incorporate direct speech and reporting clauses, and have the form of sentences, sometimes with elliptical predicates. Magazine headlines are likely to consist of two parts and have gerundial phrases. Nouns were the most frequent class of words among all analyzed media, thus preserving the nominative nature of headlines. Dots, though not very popular overall, are present in a few newspaper headlines. Supposedly, they might be forerunners of even longer headlines in future, as headlines tend to cover the entire story in a nutshell. Headlines in the form of questions are randomly distributed among media sources, being a universal feature. In addition, magazine headlines cover wider geographical areas than newspaper headlines. As for more specific topical areas, headlines highlighting educational, followed by social, financial and political issues, were the most numerous.
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