On The Foregrounding Forms Of English News Headlines

A news headline is an indispensable and crucial part of a news reporting. For the sake of space, the news writer has to communicate more with fewer words. So the news headline owns its unique language features which deserve further study.This paper aims to turn the static research on the foregrounding forms of English news headlines into a dynamic one. We selected English news headlines as our research object. All the data are collected from well-known English newspapers of China, U.S.A and Britain. Qualitative research will be the main research methodology. Detailed analyses have been made on more than 100 pieces of English news headlines. The three key issues to be solved in this paper are:what is foregrounded in English news headlines; how it is foregrounded in English news headlines and why it is foregrounded in English news headlines.To solve the first issue of "what", we would employ Figure-Ground theory, which is concerned with the principle of prominence. The Figure-Ground phenomenon is when our attention is focused on a meaningful pattern, which is considered as Figure, ignoring other patterns around it. Talmy (1978) was the first person to put it into linguistic study, and he also worked out the definitional and associative features and Figure-Ground Principle to identify Figure and Ground in language. Based on Talmy's findings, we've been able to identify the features of Figure and Ground in English news headlines. The Figure parts are usually those parts that are the latest development of a story, the citation, the result or the unexpected event. And Talmy's (2000) Figure-Ground Principle in complex sentences can also be applied to English news headlines to identify Figure, including sequence principle, inclusion principle and contingency principle.To solve the issue of "how", we have applied Leech's (1969) classification on the foregrounding forms to analyze the foregrounding forms of English news headlines. The English news headline deviates in graphological, lexical and syntactical levels to achieve foregrounding and adopts various rhetoric devices to give prominence to the Figure. For the overregularity, the English news headlines make use of alliteration and rhyme at phonological level and employ short words at lexical level to form the Figure. As for the issue of "why", the news writer adopts different foregrounding forms to realize specific functions:summarizing the main idea of the news, arousing readers' interest and expressing feelings or attitudes. Each of these functions owns its corresponding typical foregrounding forms.The news headline is actually the Figure in a news discourse, with the news body as Ground. What this thesis focuses on is to research on the foregrounding process in English news headlines. Through our analysis, we achieved the following conclusions: foregrounding forms works effectively in giving prominence to the Figure in English news headlines, and they are capable of realizing the basic functions of news headlines.Through studying the foregrounding forms of English news headlines, we could enrich the applied research of Figure-Ground theory and foregrounding theory, and provide some reference to both news editors for English news headline composing and news readers.