Meaning Construction Of English News Headline

News headline plays a unique role in news reports as it offers readers a lot of information at the first glance. And numerous scholars have been inspired to study on this topic. They have provided abundant descriptions and analyses on news headline, including its language features, functions, translation and figures of speech and so on. All these researches, however, were based on traditional linguistics, rhetoric, translatology and mass communication instead of from the perspective of modern linguistics, cognition and thinking. Hence, studies on the meaning construction of news headline still remain a sheer blank.This study tends to analyze the meaning construction of English news headline in the framework of conceptual integration theory. The author collects online news headlines from The Times, The New York Times and China Daily, in all 697 pieces, to analyze the meaning construction process of English news headline and forward related statistics and ratios.Metaphor and metonymy are frequently used in English news headlines, which in turn add difficulty for human to understand the meaning conveyed by titles. Therefore, we should work out the underlying mechanism of metaphor and metonymy in order to explain the meaning construction process of news headline and hence better understand news title. Conceptual integration theory provides a unified theoretical framework for a range of cognitive phenomena underlying linguistic knowledge. Besides, it is capable of explaining metaphor and metonymy mechanism.Based on the above facts, this thesis, under conceptual integration theoretical framework, will first analyze metaphoric and metonymic phenomena in English news headlines by way of case study and then unveil the meaning construction process of English news headline.