| A news headline is not only the essence but also an indispensable component of a piece of news. Thanks to the technological revolution and the increasingly communication in the globe, large numbers of people in different countries are eager to know the information over the world. Furthermore, with the development of media industry, news, including news headlines, is presenting its own unique characteristics. It can not only summarize the main idea and the topic of a news story, but also convey some emotions and express attitudes in a highly concise way. In order to arouse readers’ interest and attract their attention, today’s news headlines are more abundant at lexical level, more flexible at semantic level and more forms taken at syntactic level. Special writing style as it is, the news headline is different from other kinds of writing styles and even more completely independent of news work, which has been researched by an increasing number of scholars in both ancient and modern times at home and abroad.Foregrounding theory is the hot issue in stylistics and stylistic analysis at present, which is originated from painting in art, referring to the prominent part that is against the background. The development of foregrounding can be divided into three periods: Russian formalism, Prague structuralism and British stylistics. Lately, it is applied to the field of stylistic analysis in linguistics, which means some linguistic features could be highlighted in the background of the whole discourse. In general, foregrounding can be achieved through two ways: deviation and overregularity at such levels as semantics, syntax and phonology.This study will focus on the English news headlines from The Economist of the year 2014 as data from the perspective of foregrounding through deviation and overregularity. Deviation in news headlines is realized at graphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic levels. Graphological deviation is formed by unconventional use of punctuation, in which commas, question marks and several other types of marks are massively used to realize foregrounding. Lexical deviation is achieved by abbreviation, acronyms and coinages. Syntactic deviation includes ellipsis and interrogative sentences. Semantic deviation is realized by several kinds of rhetorical devices, such as metaphor, metonymy, personification, allusion, antithesis and so on. Overregularity can be categorized as phonological and syntactic overregularity. The former one contains alliteration and rhyme, the latter one is mainly about repetition and parallelism.Finally, a combination of method of qualitative and quantitative analysis is adopted to analyze the language features of English news headlines in The Economist from the perspective of foregrounding, which can not only help to understand news and headlines, but also know more about the features of news language. In addition, it contributes to exploring the characteristics and mysteries of news language from the unique writing style and provides us a new perspective and approach to the study of English news headlines. |
PDF Full Text Request