A Cognitive-Pragmatic Investigation Into The Generation And Comprehension Of Newspaper Headlines

21st century is an information era. With the increasing of communication, information plays a more and more important role in our daily life. The information carried by mass media is usually called news. News is a vital means for people to know the outside world. It tells us of the latest things happened at home and abroad. News enriches our knowledge, renews our understanding and adds to our delight.Nowadays people are flooded with news from many sources: books, magazines, radio, television, internet and newspapers. People are ready to accept news through electronic media for they transmit news with a high speed and could arouse our hearing and visual senses. To compete for a share of people's time, the newspaper attaches more importance to news headlines. A headline is the fundamental part of any news. The language features of it are so different from those of news that it is often treated as a special kind of style and discussed separately. The news headline stands out from the news and summarizes the news in a condensed or artistic way to attract readers' interest. Thanks to its importance, many scholars have discussed its stylistic features and the skills of writing it. The newspaper headline is analyzed from different angles. The thesis tries to analyze the generation and comprehension of newspaper headlines with the relevance theory.The relevance theory focuses on the degree of relevance and two governing principles—cognitive principle and communicative principle, and proposes the conception of optimal relevance. It puts forward that any ostensive-inferential communication is supposed to be of optimal relevance. Newspaper headline is a kind of one way communication process, and therefore relevance theory can offer effective explanations for the generation and comprehension of newspaper headlines.Newspaper headlines'generation and comprehension is closely related with its features. The thesis will analyze the features concisely.During the process of analyzing newspaper headlines'generation and comprehension with the relevance theory, the author found that pragmatic to refer to the supposition or assumption of the context in which the speaker makes an utterance, or it is taken as appropriate conditions necessary for the performance of speech act or the conditions that must be satisfied to make an utterance, it is taken as the mutual or background knowledge shared by both the speaker and the hearer. As for newspaper headlines, the writer's presupposition which provides the basic possibility for successful headlines plays an essential role in generation and comprehension of the headlines. Only based on appropriate presupposition can the writer construct the headline in an optimal relevant way, which will enable the reader to use least processing effort to get most contextual effect. The analysis of newspaper headlines'presupposition is the first step of using relevance theory to explain the generation and comprehension of newspaper headlines. This is why the author analyzes the presupposition of newspaper headlines.The thesis includes four parts:The first chapter is the literature review of newspaper headlines, which introduces the study of newspaper headlines at home and abroad.The second chapter is the theoretical framework related to the study, including relevance theory and presupposition.The third chapter deals with factors that influence both newspaper headlines'generation and comprehension in the framework of relevance theory, including headlines'features, presupposition, cognitive context and presupposition of newspaper headlines.The fourth chapter is the core of the thesis, which will explain newspaper headlines'generation and comprehension model.