Newspaper headlines

The aim of headlines is informational. That is to express the content of an article in a short form and besides the other function is expressive, because the aim is to attract the reader’s attention. And these 2 functions have grammatical and syntactical features.

1) Articles are often omitted.*Long trip in strange car for 2 Frenchmen

2) Omission of the verb to be *Lost Botticelli unveiled

3) Present simple is used to refer to smth that has happened, is happening or happens regularly.*Somali gunman attacks British tourists in Kenya

4) To refer to the future the infinitive is used *Britain to spend more a cancer research

5) The possessive case is preferred to the off phrase *Muslim women struggle to wear what they like

6) Attributive use of nouns. 3,4,5 nouns may be put together into a sort of block with all the nouns except the last functioning as attribute *Bread Price Rise Shock

7) As far as the vocabulary is concerned here certain words keeps repeated in headlines. These recurring words are often short, one syllable words colored by expressive and evaluative shades of meaning *pledge-promise

8) Info is combined with appraisal. There are various stylistically colored words, pins, transformed idioms. Use of abbreviations and initials.

Syntactically the most widely used structure is an elliptical sentence, which is laconic and concise on the one hand and expressive on the other hand. Other syntactical structures employed are statements, nominative sentences, questions, quotations and direct speech.

Graphically punctuation marks are widely used, especially a dash.

General features of media articles (MA)

1) MA abound in proper names (people, geographical places, numerals)

2) Newspaper articles contain a great number of bookish words, abstract words, and economic and political terms.

3) Newspaper clichés are widely used. They are stable, easily recognizable and understandable. *to step down

*to come to force

4) Lots of abbreviations and clipped forms are used to contribute conciseness

5) Abbreviations may stand for geographical places and well-known public figures.

6) Abbreviation and clipping must be well-known to the reader or explained in the text

7) A newspaper is very sensitive to everything new in the life of society therefore lots of neologisms have come into existence in mass media *long-haired

8) Some newspaper articles are written in a very expressive way. They are rich in various stylistic devices: epithets, irony, similes, metaphors, punning, and allusions. But they are all dead.

9) In syntax some news items may be very complicated. It usually refers to the news article.

The content may be expressed in 1 or 2 sentences, which are very long with a number of infinitive, participial, gerundial and nominative constructions.

10) The rules of sequences of tenses is not observed.

11) MAs contain plenty of quotations of direct speech, which may be presented without inverted commas. The content of quotations may be transformed for some purposes and supplied with ironic commas of a journalist.