A Relevance Theory Based Investigation Into News Headlines’ Generation And Comprehension

21 century is an era which is flooded with much information. Every day all kinds of newsevents take place at home and abroad. Therefore, we need to get information so as to betterserve our lives. There are many ways to know information and reading newspaper is just oneof the vital means to realize the purpose. People usually read something from top to bottomand from left to right. Based on people’s visual displacement rule, headlines usually leave thefirst impression on readers. It plays a fundamental role in news reading. The main functions ofheadlines can be summed up as the following: attracting readers’attention, summarizing thewhole text, beautifying the page. Duan Muyiwan (2001) stresses that the language ofheadlines is quite different from that of our daily conversation. In order to meet the conditionsof popularity, conciseness, entertainment and objectivity, news headlines should have thesedistinctive linguistic features: less or clever use of punctuation, shortened and elliptic sentenceform, specific and popular vocabularies, interesting and plentiful rhetoric devices. Because ofits importance, many scholars have conducted enormous researches and most of them havemade great achievement. For example, Sunil (2006) conducts researches on how to generatethe headlines in his books Headline Writing, he breaks down the headlines into smaller unitsand then studies how the smaller units should be assembled to generate effective andattractive headlines. Elly (2009) states that the crucial factors affecting the readers’comprehension of the newspaper headline are mainly two aspects: one is the inference, theother is the relevance. Zhang Jian (2007) explains that in news report, headlines consist of themost valuable information. The news headlines should be brief and concise to convey thecomplicated information, aiming at saving readers’time and lessening their cognitive efforts.However, they mostly conduct the analysis concerning the writing skills, linguistic featuresand functions. They do not systematically research the cognitive process of headlines’ generation and comprehension.The amount of information, the rhetorical devices and other factors all affect readers’cognition and interpretation of news headlines. Therefore, designing a proper headline is thekey part for a news report. This thesis takes the relevance theory proposed by Sperber andWilson (1986/1995) as the theoretical foundation to study the news headlines’generation andcomprehension and meanwhile, to answer the following three questions: (1) What are newsheadlines’linguistic features and functions? (2) How do news writers generate news headlines?(3) How do readers make the comprehension when reading headlines?The Relevance Theory, since proposed, has been utilized to analyze varieties of data.This theory mainly includes: the optimal relevance, the ostensive-inferential communicationand cognitive context. This thesis employs the relevance theory and takes data from ChinaDaily to study news headlines’generation and comprehension. Data analysis indicates that: (1)news headlines’generation process is actually the process of readers’cognitive presuppositionanalysis. Based on the framework of relevance theory, if the headlines want to gain theoptimal relevance’effect, news writers should make proper cognitive presupposition ofreaders and take readers’cognitive context into consideration. (2) News writers should judgewhich is asserting information and which is background information. Though thepresupposition is not definitely true or maybe it is not the information that readers knowbefore, it should be the information readers and news writers both have no objection to orboth accept. (3) The process of headlines’comprehension is quite opposite. From theheadlines presented, readers use ostensive-inferential principle to make presuppositions. (4)Readers should activate the information from their cognitive context to get the optimalrelevance so that they can make the least processing effort and get the most contextual effect..Through the research, the author expects to provide some aids for news headlines’further research. Besides, it can help news writers design more proper and better headlinesand help readers quickly and accurately understand the real meaning of editors.