Abstract
Newspaper headlines are described as compressed and ambiguous pieces of discourse that represent the bodies of the articles. Their main function is to provide the readers with an informative message they would have no prior idea about. Ifantidou (2009) claims that the function of a headline is to get the readers’ attention rather than providing information because it does not have to represent the whole of the article it refers to. This paper aims at examining this hypothesis in relation to scientific news headlines reported by a number of news agencies. The paper follows Halliday (1967) information structure theory by applying it on ten selected headlines; each two headlines represent one scientific discovery reported by different news agencies. One of them is presented by the most popular news agency on science; National Geographic then it is compared to one of the well-known news agencies like BBC, Reuters or Yahoo. The results showed that scientific news headlines are more informative than being just catchy headlines. It is also found that National Geographic news agency is more informative than any other agency because it is specialized in science. It is concluded that the more new information units a headline includes the less ambiguous it is for the readers.
Highlights
Language as a means of communication among people can take various forms that can be received by human beings
In terms of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1978) by David Crystal, headlines occur in full gigantic size letters and have their unique set of grammatical rules
The researcher aimed at making a comparison between national geographic headlines and the same scientific news headlines reported by a number of well-known news agencies like Reuters, BBC, and yahoo news
Summary
Language as a means of communication among people can take various forms that can be received by human beings. Headlines come to use for the first time in the late nineteenth century, when the competition between newspapers increased to see which one to catch the readers’ attention more This fact sheds light on the main role of headlines which is to get the readers’ interest and attention to the story and motivate them to move to read the whole article so as to collect all parts of the story. It is usually composed and written by the newspaper’s editor or reporter who tries to use different devices and strategies in order to attract the attention.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
