A Study On Referring Expressions In English Newspaper Headlines From Accessibility Theory

Referring is a main function of language and then referring expression has always been a hot topic of semantic study. Accessibility is a cognitive concept borrowed from psychology, which refers to the relative ease with which the addressee draws a linguistic or memorial unit from the mental memory system. The word'accessibility'the author discusses in this thesis is also a psycholinguistic concept, and is an attribute represented mainly by noun phrases. This thesis is to study the distribution of the referring expressions in the accessibility marker scale.This thesis begins with a detailed introduction of theoretical foundations, guiding principles, accessibility marker scale and three characteristics of Accessibility theory, which is put forward by Ariel in 1990. Then the author discusses the properties of the'appropriate headline', the previous study on the news headlines as well as the accessibility markers in the headlines. Combing the previous two chapters, the author collected headlines from two British newspapers as data to study the distribution in the accessibility scale of referring expressions in the headlines in all newspapers as well as in different newspapers and different sections.The author collected all the headlines excluding advertisement and other notices from two newspapers published in Britain from November 1, 2005 to November 7, 2005. . One is The Times, a nationwide subscription'quality paper'; the other is Evening Standard, a local retail'tabloid'. A total number of 16203 referring expressions are obtained, consisting of 10105 in The Times and 6098 in Evening Standard.Then the author conducts analysis to the data and concludes that: (1) there is a clear preference for intermediate accessibility markers in the headlines, which is different from the prediction made by Accessibility Theory that there should be more use of low accessibility markers in the headlines since entities are first mentioned; (2) different genres shows a similarity in the use of accessibility markers since the quality paper The Times and the tabloid Evening Standard, as well as different sections in the same newspapers show no big differences in the distribution of accessibility markers.