Headlines as illocutionary subacts: The genre-specificity of headlines

Abstract

This study investigates if headlines in journalism are genre-specific. Taking a starting point in Austin's concept of illocutionary act, Searle's development of the concept, and the adaptation of the concept to texts within rhetorical genre studies (Bazerman, 1994; Miller, 1984) and pragmatic text linguistics (Borchmann, 2005, 2010, 2014), the study assumes that the texts of a specific genre comprise various subordinated illocutionary acts which must contribute to the fulfilment of the typified purpose that the textual macro-act serves. Accordingly, headlines are considered to be subacts, i.e. illocutionary acts whose conditions of satisfaction are determined by the typified purpose of the text they form a part of. This functional account suggests that headlines are genre-specific. The present study tests this hypothesis by means of two analyses: a comparative pragmatic analysis of 300 headlines from three different genres, and a comparative pragmatic analysis of 90 texts from three different genres. The material used in both surveys are texts of the genres news, analysis and column in the Danish omnibus newspaper Politiken.The result of the comparative analysis of headlines is that it is possible to identify genre-specific pragmatic features of headlines. The results of the comparative analysis of texts are that there are functional relations between pragmatic features of headlines and the accepted purpose of the textual macro-act they form a part of, and that there are genre-specific rhetorical relations between headlines and the body of the texts. On this basis, the distinctive conditions of satisfactions of each of the three illocutionary subacts news headline, headline of analysis and headline of column are stated.