Publication details
The Pragmatic Functions of Tense in News Headlines and Beyond
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Due to their specific lexical and syntactic properties, news headlines are often considered to be a distinct text type, or even an independent genre. Nevertheless, it should not be overlooked that they form an inseparable part of the entire news story and operate as a distinct textual segment that serves as the point of entry into the entire news text (cf. Bell 1991). In this presentation, I approach headlines as a distinct structural and functional unit of news articles, arguing that they are governed by a particular textual rhetoric. To this end, I explore the relationship between the headline, the lead and the body copy as well as trace the grammatical, lexical and structural transformations between these central segments of news stories, based on the exploration of co-referentiality and lexical/process chains inspired by Halliday’s cohesion analysis. I suggest that the key to our understanding of the formal features of headlines consists in the reversed text-producing pattern (body copy, lead, headline) rather than the readers’ linear processing of news texts. |
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