A Study On The Lexical Features Of English News Headlines

Based on the theoretical framework of stylistics and lexicology,this thesis analyzes the lexical features of 2009 news headlines taken from the print-edition of TNYTs and the website of Yahoo News.With the combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches and under the utilization of some corpus analysis software,a comparative research focusing on the perspectives of word length,word frequency,lexical density,word class and word formation is conducted between the news headlines and Brown Corpus as well as the conclusions of previous studies and arrives at the conclusions:1.In terms of word length,there are mainly midget words in news headlines;5-letter words account for the largest proportion;news headline has a mean word length of 5.13,which is slightly longer than that of Brown Corpus.2.Among the top 50 high frequency words of news headlines,the function words take up 62%and content words hold 38%,among which nouns take a dominant proportion.As for Brown Corpus,all the top 50 high frequency words are function words.3.With regard to lexical density,news headline has a much higher STTR than that of Brown Corpus,which indicates that words in news headlines are diverse.4.The analysis of word class shows that nouns,with a percentage of 53,account for a dominant proportion of the whole,among which proper nouns take a large part.5.The study of word formation arrives at the conclusion that affixation has the most powerful productivity in news headlines having a percentage of 55.2;abbreviation ranks the second accounting for 22.49%;compounding and conversion take up 14.34%and 7.97%respectively.This study broadens the scope of the study of English News Headlines,supplements and develops the previous studies.The findings will help English learners to have an overview of the lexical features of English news headlines so as to better understand the headlines.