| Due to the unique role that newspaper headlines play in the media, the studies ofthe news headlines have drawn much attention of researchers on news languageresearch. The network news has become one of the most important and fastestchannels for people to gain the information. As enrichment and essence of the newstexts, the headlines have played an important role in satisfying the need for efficientand convenient access to information for the readers.In recent years, studies of news headlines have made continuous achievements.Given special attention to news and news headlines, this paper attempts to combinenews headlines with news texts to explore discourse patterns of news and therealization strategy reflected by news headlines from the perspective of discourseanalysis. The objective of this paper is to probe into the study of English newsheadlines in discourse construction.This paper reviewed different researches and classifications of discourse patternsput forward by Hoey(1983), Winter (1994) and McCarthy(1991) and made an attemptto address the following three issues:1. What are the structural patterns of news realized by news headlines?2. What clause relations and linguistic features do news headlines reflect in newstexts?3. What are the textual relations and discourse functions of the news headlines?Descriptive analysis was employed to examine the English news headlines indiscourse construction. By using random sampling, computer filtering and manuallysearching,81news and news headlines in the column “2012US Presidential Election”from October6th,2012to November6th,2012derived from Washington Post werecollected and analyzed. The findings are as follows:Firstly，in news corpus, General-specific pattern is the most common mode; thesecond is claim-response pattern, followed by problem-solution pattern. The newsheadlines from each pattern express some sort of summarizing function, either fromthe perspective of the whole passage, such as representing the news text ingeneral-specific pattern, or from some part of the text, such as being a “problem” in the headlines.Secondly，from the view of exploration of the clause relations in different newsheadlines，it is found that as to the headlines of problem-solution patterns, the mostdistinctive clause relation is question-response relation. In claim-response patterns, themost distinctive clause relation is situation-evaluation relation. In general-specificpatterns, the most distinctive clause relation is compatibility (general-specific) relation.In terms of linguistic features, there are two kinds of manifestations in lexical features:1) wide use of verbs and adjectives with emotion,2) wide use of phrases. Forgrammatical features, there are two expressions: frequent use of present tense andomission of certain words.Thirdly, it is found that headlines are parts of the texts. From the corpus of news,we summed up four functions of news headlines: cognitive function,behavior-influence function, orientated function and summarizing function in terms ofexploration of the relation between the news headlines and news texts. Among them,the summarizing function is the most common function of news headlines. Specifically,in problem-solution patterns, most headlines reflect cognitive function, inclaim-response patterns, most headlines show behavior-influence function and ingeneral-specific patterns, most headlines express summarizing function.In addition, the findings of the paper also provide some suggestions to thefunctional application of headlines and offer some references and enlightenments tothe reading and understanding of news texts in reality as well. |
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