Language Use in Selected Newspaper Headlines

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to establish the unique role of the language of newspaper headlines as a vehicle of conveying meaning, expressing human thoughts and actions and maintaining human social solidarity. A sample of fourteen (14) headline reports on anti-corruption is purposively isolated from The Nation and The Punch newspapers of 2016. The headlines are analyzed based on M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). Though the functional components of ideational, interpersonal and textual levels of the model were identified, only the ideational strand of the model was adopted in the analysis of data. The research reveals that national representations, role allocation to participants by activation/ passivation, overlapping of process categories and verbalization of processes are some of the ways writers represent their ideology of a given situation and events. The research also shows data categorization into material, verbalization and mental processes. The dominant process type, material processes, therefore, is an important tool that writers use in communicating their messages and ideologies through words and texts to the masses.