| In the information age, reading the latest news is a part of almost everyone’s daily life. People utilize various ways to obtain information in the modern society, such as television, the internet, We-chat, newspapers and so on. However, no matter in what ways to get information, people first focus on news headlines. News headlines are an important component of news reports. In order to attract people’s attention, the design of news headlines must have a high standard in the language choice. Presuppositions can not only condense the news headlines, but provide additional information and stimulate readers’ previous knowledge. The presupposition use in news headlines is a process of language choices to attract readers’ attention.According to adaptation theory, language use is a process of the continuous choice of language. Therefore, this study attempts to explore the presupposition use in news headlines from the perspective of adaptation theory. The study takes 1048 pieces of news headlines as the research objects, which collect from the authoritative and comprehensive daily newspaper, the Guardian, including three different types, politics news headlines, business headlines and lifestyle news headlines. In addition, three small-scale corpora of the three types of news headlines are created to analyze presuppositions in English news headlines. In the study, quantitative analysis is taken in combination with qualitative analysis.This study aims to answer the following questions:(1) How are the presuppositions distributed in politics, business and lifestyle news headlines respectively?(2) How is the adaptation realized between presuppositions and communicative context in the three types of news headlines?Based on adaptation theory, the corpora of the collected news headlines are analyzed. The results show that:(1) Presuppositions are employed in politics news headlines, business news headlines and life news headlines with different occurrences. The occurrences of presuppositions in the three types of news headlines are 284, 270 and 256 respectively. Among them, descriptive statistics show presuppositions in politics news headlines are higher, and presuppositions in lifestyle news headlines are fewer relatively. However, the results of One-Way ANOVA show that there is no significance difference of presuppositions in three types of news headlines. In other words, the types of news headlines have no significant impact on presupposition use.(2) Presupposition use in news headlines is a process of adaptation behavior. As a language choice, presuppositions in news headlines are the result of adaptation to communicative context. Specifically, in physical world, presuppositions in news headlines adapt to newspaper’s layout and save readers’ time. In social world, presuppositions adapt to the standard of reporting news events objectively. In mental world, presuppositions adapt to readers’ interest and arouse their interest, adapt to readers’ background information, and adapt to readers’ expectation of follow-up reports. |
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