Transformation Of Phraseological Units In The Headlines On Russian Newspaper

Headlines are part and parcel of newspaper,to which readers primarily pay attention.In this information era,paper media and electronic media are competing with each other.To tap into news,authors always chase after novel headlines serving for attracting readers' attention and arousing their interest.Accordingly,a news headline is usually featured by its simple,easy-to-remember,and impressive words.Russian phraseological units are highly expressive,concise,and vivid,most of which mirror the attitude and position of a user through their own stylistic features.Therefore,in newspaper headlines authors often use phraseological units familiar to readers.Headlines as such are concise and eye-catching.Meanwhile,in an endeavor to enhance the expressiveness and emotional impact,authors often turn to parody,thus making related headlines more characteristic and expressive without losing the unique effects of phraseological units.There are many ways to transform phraseological units in the headlines on the Russian newspapers,including i).compositional changes(replacing a component or several components,expanding and truncating);ii).semantic changes;iii).structural transformations(syntactic transformation,transition of interpretational structure,and inversion of phraseological units);iv).the synthesis of several phraseological units in a single title.The aforementioned practices help achieve the following rhetorical and practical effects:first,such a headline can easily attract readers'attention,which promise a dig into the full text;secondly,a parodied title boils down the gist of an article,through which readers can expect the contents;thirdly,headlines using this rhetorical method shows the authors'evaluations,position or attitude,which is thought-provoking and may influence readers' stance;fourth,thanks to its expressiveness,this type of heading is humorous and helps realize the pun intended;finally,decent transformations of idioms,together with subtitles,prefaces and texts,promise aesthetic effects.The present study use headings of Russian newspapers as its objects.All the examples are extracted from Russian newspapers and news sites(e.g.,Izvestia,Komsomolskaya Pravda,Arguments and Facts,lenta.ru,iz.ru(electronic version of the newspaper?Izvestia"),gazeta.ru)from May 2017 to February2019.The significance of this study lies in four aspects.Firstly,the introduction of phraseological theory deepens our understanding of phraseology,especially the one of phraseology in a broad sense;finding out differences between the variant of phraseology and its conversion will help us better understand them.Secondly,the specification of methods for converting phraseological units in headlines helps readers better understand news headlines.Thirdly,in terms of rhetoric,such an analysis and summary of the practical effects by transforming phraseological units in newspapers and periodicals headlines can serves as a guide for subsequent research,varying from psycholinguistics to multinational comparative studies.The introduction part makes clear the choice of research topic,the history and status quo of research at home and abroad,the object,purpose,main objectives,specific methods,innovations and practical significance of this research.The first chapter analyzes the linguistic characteristics of newspaper through a stylistics lens where the theory of functional style is used.Then the role of the newspaper headlines is analyzed.Moreover,difference variants of phraseological units and their transformation of is highlighted.Informed by the theory of Russian phraseology(in a broad sense),Chapter Two summarizes specific methods for parodying phraseological units.The third chapter analyzed the practical effects of parodied phraseological units in Russian newspaper headlines.The concluding part marks conclusions of this study,and future promising areas of related research are proposed.