A Pragmatic Study On English Network News Headlines Based On Relevance Theory

Headlines, as the primary means to attract the reader’s attention, are the "eyes” ofa news report. Accordingly, the headline’s creation is the key to write a news report.Network news refers to the news taking the network as the carrier. Following theinformation era, network news has become our main access to obtain the outsideinformation. Since China’s full access to internet in1994, network news has beenplaying a more and more important role in our daily life, which can not be matched bytraditional news. However so far, most academic researches on the news headlines areconcentrated on the newspapers, radio and television news headlines, and the researchof network news headlines is relatively limited.The Relevance Theory supposed by Sperber and Wilson has made a great effecton the research of linguistics. This thesis mainly applies Relevance Theory to thecreativity of network news headline from the perspective of cognitive. The corpuscollections are mainly from several authoritative English-language news networkwebsite (China daily, VOA, BBC). English network news headlines can be regardedas a communication between editor and reader. Applying the communicative view ofRelevance Theory to the network news headlines, this thesis claims that the ostensivestimulus, the cognitive context and the contextual effect, etc play a very important roleduring the communicative process of network news headlines between editor andreader and the optimal relevance is the standard of headline creativity.This thesis also has some practical significance that it provides some suggestionsfor the editor of the network news to design more appropriate headlines in order toattract readers’ attention. For designing news headline, firstly, the editor must ensurethat the headline can attract the target reader’s attention; Secondly, the headline editorshould fully take the reader’s cognitive context and the changes of the target marketinto consideration; Furthermore, the headline editor should encourage readers to makea certain amount of processing effort to obtain as many contextual effects as possible. It is wise for news editors to follow the fundamental principle when writing newsheadlines, that is, news headlines can produce more contextual effects by directing thereaders to the appropriate context of interpretation. In doing so, the headline editor cancreate the innovative and creative headline, and can guarantee the smoothcommunication with target reader.