On The Achievement Of Optimal Relevance In English Newspaper Headlines

Relevance Theory is one of the most significant theories in pragmatics. It is widely used in discourse analysis. Recent years, there are many pragmatic studies on discourse analysis. Some are on TV programmes, some are on advertisements, and some are even on cartoon dialogues. But there is little analysis on how to achieve optimal relevance in English newspaper headlines. This thesis is based on previous studies on discourse analysis and studies on Relevance Theory, aiming at finding the ways in which optimal relevance is achieved in English newspaper headlines.Communication is an ostensive-inferential process, and the research focuses on the journalist’s ostensive process, the reader’s inferential process, and the achievement of optimal relevance in this ostensive-inferential process.This research uses qualitative analysis. The data is collected from experiments of50seniors who have passed English TEM-8exam in the college. The experimenter will pick up a total of50headlines on5themes in English newspaper. Each of the subjects will be asked to infer the content of the news from those headlines, and then their supposition will be compared with the news. After the experiments, the headlines with optimal relevance of each theme will be analyzed to answer the research questions.