Abstract
Newspaper editorials constitute a part of media discourse, which is an extremely important field of research in intercultural rhetoric analysis and EFL (English as a foreign language)/ESL (English as a second language) studies. Specifically, certain features of editorial headlines and also their important role in monitoring and directing readers’ attention have made the interface between the linguistic analysis of newspaper editorial headlines and teaching of EFL as a relevant issue in language teaching. Through conducting a contrastive textual analysis of selected headlines, culled from the editorials of the English newspaper, The New York Times, and those of Persian newspaper, Tehran Times, the present study aimed at exploring the kind of textual and rhetorical strategies the two newspapers used for propagating their preferred ideologies. The results of the study indicated that headlines in the two papers presented a subjective attitude of the writers (newspapers) toward the topic. However, based on the analysis of the data, it became clear that there were certain differences between the two sets of headlines in terms of Presupposition, and certain Rhetorical devices.
Highlights
Newspaper editorials, as a subgenre of the newspaper genre (Bell, 1991), are of importance in news discourse
The analysis of the headlines in the two papers revealed that the newspaper headlines introduced the topic of the editorials and presented the subjective attitude of the writers toward the topic aiming at influencing and shaping the readers’ understanding of the editorial text
New York Times (NYT) and Tehran Times (TT) metonymically used the names of the countries, for example, to refer to the institutions or political/social statuses of the countries
Summary
As a subgenre of the newspaper genre (Bell, 1991), are of importance in news discourse. As an opening section to their relevant main text, have been ascribed different functions. Bell (1991) and Nir (1993) have made a distinction between headlines functioning as the abstract of the main event of the story and headlines as promoting one of the details of the story. Transcending the above-mentioned distinctions in headlines, Iarovici and Amel argued, The implicit convention between author and reader regarding the intention of correlating a text to another text as a headline, and regarding the formal marking of this quality by a privileged position, concerns the double function of the headline: a semantic function, regarding the referential text, and a pragmatic function, regarding the reader (the receiver) to whom the text is addressed. The two functions are simultaneous, the semantic function being included in and justified by the pragmatic function. (cited in Dor, 2003, p. 698)
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