Although newspaper headlines are structured by a need to encode sources and their utterances as evidential bases of knowledge, they also communicate writers’ stances towards this evidence. Furthermore, these headlines may depend upon readers using shared patterns of knowledge to fill in implicit information. With reference to a small-scale corpus of headlines from online versions of British national newspapers, this study focuses first, on rhetorical and pragmatic factors that intervene between encodings of sources and their utterances, and writer stances towards them. Attention then moves to how nominal phrases in tabloid headlines require readers to use shared cognitive models to infer meanings. Findings suggest that both directions of research require more explicit theories of semantic/pragmatic interfaces and cognitive interfaces.
Evidentiality and Nominal Phrases in British Tabloid Headlines
GRAY, GEOFFREY MICHAEL
2009-01-01
Abstract
Although newspaper headlines are structured by a need to encode sources and their utterances as evidential bases of knowledge, they also communicate writers’ stances towards this evidence. Furthermore, these headlines may depend upon readers using shared patterns of knowledge to fill in implicit information. With reference to a small-scale corpus of headlines from online versions of British national newspapers, this study focuses first, on rhetorical and pragmatic factors that intervene between encodings of sources and their utterances, and writer stances towards them. Attention then moves to how nominal phrases in tabloid headlines require readers to use shared cognitive models to infer meanings. Findings suggest that both directions of research require more explicit theories of semantic/pragmatic interfaces and cognitive interfaces.
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