| News headlines take a very important part in information transmission. Manystudies have demonstrated that the readers are likely to spend most of their timescanning the headlines instead of reading the contents. Especially with the advent of thenetwork, owing to the layout of web news headlines (separation of headlines andcontents) and the readers’ habits of reading news, the role of news headlines is notneglected as the gateway to the contents. Therefore, the editors will produce attractiveheadlines for sensationalism by all means in that the attractiveness of headlinesdetermines the click-through rates which the rapid commercialization of news mediafixates on improving. As a result, it turns out that the headlines do not summarize themain contents well. Even the editors make up false information to mislead the readers.Nowadays, misleading is a very common phenomenon having fundamentally changedthe ecology of online news. As such, the research focuses on web entertainment newsheadlines (WENHs for short) collected from Chinese mainstream media and sets out toinvestigate the ways of and reasons behind the production of misleading from thepragmatic perspective based on the two research questions:Firstly, the research probes into the ways of making misleading WENHs by editors.It will be addressed from the perspective of headline interpretation. The data areanalyzed by drawing on Grice’s Cooperative Principle (CP for short) and its maxims.The news headline is a unilateral communication different from face-to-face exchanges.CP is the prerequisite for successful communication and news headlines are producedby observing the CP and its maxims; otherwise, it is likely to produce misleadingheadlines as a result of violation of one of the maxims by the editors. Secondly, theresearch proceeds to conduct an attribution study on WENHs. Couched withinVerschueren’s Adaption Theory (AT for short), the ingredients of communicativecontext are analyzed from the perspective of headline production. More specific factorsare analyzed from the editors’ voices, the mental world, the social world and thephysical world. It is concluded that the production of misleading WENHs is an adaptionto the communicative context though misleading is a negative linguistic phenomenon. Although it is a preliminary pragmatic study on misleading WENHs, the research notonly highlights the ways of producing headlines by editors, but also explains therelationship between misleading and ingredients of communicative context relating tosociety, cognition, mind and so on. It facilitates the understanding of this commonphenomenon from various aspects. Besides, more relevant in-depth studies are believedto throw light on the phenomenon. |
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