| Just as what a scholar proposes,"When viewed from the perspective of a text, natural sentences would take on more or less changes when they are used as headlines. And these very changes are the so-called textualisation."(刘云,2002) This thesis intends to apply this notion of "textualisation" into web-news headlines.Through a comparative study of textualisations in English and Chinese web-news headlines,similarities and differences will be spotted,and the motivations and functions of textualisations of news headlines will be found out.Moreover,the perspective of a text here mainly refers to the fact that news headlines are treated both as an independent text and indispensable part of the whole news text as well.The comparative analysis is carried out at three levels respectively:the lexical,syntactical and graphological level.Throughout the informed researches,serious imbalances do exist:first,researches from the rhetorical angle are more often than the study of the language itself.Second,the vocabulary of news headlines gains much more attention than a systematical study of the grammar of headlines.And the study of grammatical features of news headlines from the perspective of a text is even few.Although the research on newspaper headlines are wide and comprehensive,the more and more popular web-news headlines still lack an all-around study beyond the restricted ones on vocabulary and rhetoric.As for the comparison of English and Chinese web-news headlines,there is no lack of individual researches on Chinese ones,English ones,the comparative studies of newspaper headlines and those of different category of news.The comparative study of English and Chinese web-news headlines are few and far between.By searching the corpus,the author found only the comparative study on abbreviations used in web-news headlines, As for the notion of "textualisations",it is first proposed by Liu Yun in 2002 in his research finding A Study of Textualisation of Titles in Chinese Writings.And it is on this finding that another scholar Peng Zongping published a research result in 2006,called A Brief Study of Textualisation of Titles in TV News.The linguistic data collected is of the 2008 Olympic reports during 8 to 24 Aug, 2008,mainly collected from several authoritative and popular sports news websites,such as www.beijing2008.cn,2008.sina.com.cn,2008.sohu.com,ESPN,Reuters and Google archived search engine,etc.1564 Chinese headlines and 1278 English headlines are collected.By categorizing and describing the data,the characteristics of the textualisation of English and Chinese web-news headlines are studied and described respectively at three levels:the lexical,the syntactical and the graphological.The findings of this research are:the textualisation of English web-news headlines takes place more on words,while that of Chinese headlines mostly stays at the syntactical level.What follows next is a discussion at the syntactical level with implication,ellipses and displacement as major methods employed to realize the textualisation in headlines.Then the headlines are further examined graphologically, thinking that almost all English and Chinese headlines are single-deck ones.And the most often seen headlines is in the frame of A:B.Finally,how common punctuation markers are used in news headlines is exploredThe significance of the study lies in explaining and describing similar or different textualisations in web-news headlines,hence become a valuable reference for the making and translation of English and Chinese web-news headlines. |
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