Stylistic Features And Pragmatic Analysis Of English News Headlines

Having permeated into almost every field of our human society, news stands in acontrolling position to spread massive information which tells the public what isgoing on around the world, inland and abroad, providing different standpoints of allkinds and people's diverse comments. Three elements are usually gathered in a newsreport: the news headline, the lead and the news body in which the headline and thebody are indispensable while the lead sometimes can be omitted, according to the realneed.Headline is one of the most elementary parts of a news report. Because generallypeople do not have sufficient time to read every passage from the beginning to the end,most of them will skim over the headlines to get as many useful information as theycan in a limited time. From this, headline's peculiar significance can be reflected. Sostudy on English news headlines should not be ignored.This thesis is to analyze the English news headlines in a systematic andcomprehensive way, first analyzing headline's characteristics and then doing theresearch on them by applying pragmatic theories—the relevance theory andpresupposition.This paper consists of five chapters. In Chapter One, the author makes aliterature review on English news headlines, mainly elaborating what exactly newsheadline is, its functions in society and the requirements of it, i.e. the writing rules forheadline. Previous researches on news headlines are also expatiated.In Chapter Two, the author starts with the definition of pragmatics and thenintroduces the theoretical background of this study—the relevance theory and thepresupposition. As for relevance theory, the ostensive-inferential communication andoptimal relevance are mentioned. It indicates that any ostensive-inferentialcommunication is thought to be with the aim of achieving optimal relevance.Processes of writing and reading are also progress of ostensive-inferentialcommunication, hence, the relevance theory can be considered as a good explanation for news headlines'function of communication. As for the theory of presupposition,its definition and characteristics are described. The action of presupposition is putforward by writers who presuppose subjectively that readers share a commonknowledge with them. Hence, English news headlines, as the essence of reports, mustinclude presupposition triggers which have thirteen major categories.In Chapter Three, there is a brief introduction to stylistics. And then based onmassive headline examples adopted from media like New York Times, Economist orChina Daily, etc., the author mainly analyzes English news headlines'stylisticfeatures in three different aspects: words (lexical level), grammar and rhetoricaldevices.In Chapter Four, the author combines news headlines'stylistic features and thepragmatic theories together, that is, applies pragmatic theories to the analysis of theselanguage phenomena. She intends to check out, in pragmatics sense, how theestablished news headlines containing such features realize their value, and to makeclear whether they really reach to expected effects, and whether they conform withpragmatic standards. On the other hand, she also aims to help people, both writers andreaders see through the linguistic nature of news headlines under pragmatic sense.Therefore, it does research from perspectives of relevance theory and presuppositionon the features of the three levels one by one.In the last chapter, the author makes a conclusion of the whole dissertation,summarizing the major findings, i.e. first enabling readers and writers to understandand edit English news headlines much better respectively, and then enriching thisstudy from aspect of pragmatics. She still states the research limitations and someadvices for the further study of this topic in the future.