| Headlines are not only the concentration of the news content, but also the portal and the eye of the news. In order to catch the readers’attention quickly and provide more information, editors have to highlight the headlines in order to emphasize the news content; besides, they employ a large number of title news directly. The pace of modern life is accelerating; the amount of information is increasing; and the speed of information flow is getting fast. As a result, readers pay more attention to the way of finding the news they need through reading the headlines and they are more inclined to the style of fast food consumption, which formally indicates the arrival of "read headlines" era. As media competition is becoming fiercer, news headlines have been playing a more and more important role in highlighting the unique image of a particular newspaper, and thus have an effect on readers’preference and loyalty to particular newspapers. Therefore, newspaper editors also pay more attention to the innovation of news headlines; at the same time, network language and buzzwords continue to get involved in news language, bringing a surge of fashion to news headlines. This phenomenon has aroused the concern of many scholars, from whom there are many critical voices. In this paper, the author will not make a judgment on this phenomenon. Instead, the author will focus on finding cognitive justifications for these novel expressions from the perspective of language decategorization and analyze the language features of these expressions so as to provide a theoretical basis for the "non-standard" language usage in newspapers as well as more corpus support for the theory of decategorization.Through the analysis of the collected news headlines from the perspective of detegorization, the author reached the following conclusions:In the decategorized expressions of news headlines, in addition to the structures that have been summarized by former researchers, such as nouns-decategorization, verbs-decategorization and "verb phrases plus objects" structure (nouns and verbs decategarized at the same time), the author also found that there exist many examples of adjectives-decategorization and prepositions-decategorization. Different kinds of decategorization serve different function. The major function of a decategorized noun is to act as an affix, an adjective, a verb or an adverb; a decategorized adjective is mainly used as an adverb, a verb or a noun; a decategorized preposition plays the role of an adjective or an adverb to modify nouns, adjectives and verbs.The phenomenon of decategorization is not invented, but it is based on human cognitive mechanisms:metaphoric mechanism and metonymic mechanism. Metaphor plays an extremely important role in the changes of human thinking and language. The semantic polysemy and functional polysemy occurring in the process of decategorization and the operating mechanisms of decategorization are all dependent on the metaphoric cognitive styles; metonymy is used to explain the generating method of decategorization.The reason why decategorization has already been widely used in news headlines is that its simplicity, novelty and vividness meet the demands of good headlines, that is, they are concise and can express the news content vividly, thus increasing the competitiveness of news media.The analysis of decategorization in news headlines not only provides a new linguistic perspective for the research into news headlines and help readers to better understand the novel expressions, but also expands the research scope of decategorization. To a certain extent, it promotes the development of decategorization theory. |
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