A study of the strategies of pragmalinguistic impact in English political newspaper headlines

الملخص EN

The present study analyses pragma linguistically the English newspaper headlines.

It hypothesizes that, in newspaper headlines, the reporter tries to be more direct in revealing his / her views, ideas, convictions … etc, since the reader is absent or imaginary and the reporter’s main concern is to create a great impact on such a type of readers.

The study provides a pragmalinguistic analysis of selected headlines from specific English newspapers, i.e.: Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post, showing how the newspaper reporter can explicitly and implicitly communicate his / her views to the reader by using short expressions.

The paper consists of the introduction, the problem, the hypotheses, the aims, and its value.

It deals with the theoretical background of newspapers and the concepts of pragmatics andpragmalinguistics.

It gives a comprehensive explanation of the concept of headline and the pragmatic features in headlines.

The paper shows that headlines have their own special linguistic and pragmatic rules such as the use of special vocabulary, simple tense, acronyms , abbreviations and the use of ambiguous sentences; this is concerning the linguistic rules, while the pragmatic rules are the use of representative speech acts, existential presupposition and some how conversational implicature.

To achieve this end, it is hypothesized that the language of newspaper headlines is different in structure, vocabulary, and ambiguous use of words from the ordinary language, and in newspaper headlines, the writer tries to mean more than what is literally expressed by using some pragmatic aspects.

The researcher has arrived at the following conclusions: It is observed that article deletion is the most frequent type of deletion in the analyzed corpus.

The analysis of the data shows that special vocabulary constitutes a distinctive marker of the headlines under analysis.

In the light of the results of the study, some recommendations are made for the improvement in studying and understanding the language of journalism in general and headlines in particular.

English programs should expose learners to different discourse and text types including headlines and news stories.