Analyzing Linguistic Characteristics Of English Newspaper Headlines From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of human communication, master of in-timeinformation is becoming more and more important. It is an indispensablepart of daily life for people to read various aspects of news every day.Newspaper acts as a kind of traditional mass media, and is a vital carrier ofnews transmission. In this huge information source of newspapers, readers’choices of selecting news is achieved by glancing through headlines at first,headlines link news contents with readers, so headlines have the function ofrevealing, explaining and evaluating news contents.This thesis attempts to apply relevance theory to analyze and discuss thelanguage use of English newspaper headlines in a systematic andcomprehensive way from the perspective of pragmatics in order to exploreheadlines’ characteristics in language use. The method of documentaryresearch is adopted, and then to resolve three questions:(1) What is thecognitive nature of English newspaper headlines?(2) How is thecommunication realized between editors and readers during the process ofwriting and understanding English newspaper headlines?(3) What arelinguistic characteristics of English newspaper headlines?On the basis of existing researches on relevance theory, this thesis takesdata from China Daily to analyze newspaper headlines’ linguisticcharacteristics and figures out:(1) The cognitive nature of Englishnewspaper headlines is relevance.(2) In essence, the process of writing andunderstanding English newspaper headlines between editors and readers isthe process of ostensive-inferential communication. To write newspaperheadline is a sort of ostensive communication process, editors set languageinformation as ostensive stimulus elaborately according to the specificcontext of news and their own notions in order to make readers get maximal contextual effects with the least effort and realize headlines’ informative andcommunicative intentions. To understand newspaper headline is a sort ofinferential communication process, readers are continuous to think aboutcontextual assumptions according to their own related knowledge andexperience in order to hunt for the best context and gain the optimalrelevance between the news and readers.(3) Linguistic characteristics ofEnglish newspaper headlines serve as ostensive information, to therelevance between newspaper headlines and news contents, it mainlyfocuses on the phonetic, grammatical, lexical, and rhetorical levels, in whichthe phonetic, grammatical and lexical levels have relative fixed rules tofollow while the application of rhetoric must be in accord with certaincontext of news. To the relevance between newspaper headlines and readers’cognitive psychology, it mainly stresses that newspaper headlines shouldclose to readers’ condition and adapt to readers’ need.Through the analysis and study of English newspaper headlines’linguistic characteristics, this thesis aims to make further progress inin-depth researching on linguistic characteristics of newspaper headlines; onthe one hand, it is helpful for editors to design appropriate headlines toattract readers’ attentions and achieve the effective information transmission,on the other hand, it is helpful for readers to learn a variety of languagephenomena to read headlines fluently and understand news contentsaccurately.