Metaphors and metonymies in New York Times and Times Supplement news headlines

Abstract

The New York Times (NYT) publishes the Times Supplement (TS) in Taiwan every week. Although TS news articles are edited lightly from their corresponding NYT articles, TS headlines are often rewritten heavily. This paper addresses the cognitive, pragmatic, and rhetorical roles of conceptual metaphors and metonymies in TS and NYT headlines, focusing on variations in non-lexicalized metaphors and metonymies (namely those which have not been adopted into the lexicon). A textual survey and stylistic analysis were conducted on a corpus of 605 pairs of corresponding NYT and TS news articles. The results of the textual survey show that non-lexicalized metaphors and metonymies occur in more NYT headlines than TS headlines. Thus the degree of non-lexicalized figurations is reduced to make TS headlines more accessible to the TS reader. The stylistic analysis demonstrates that non-lexicalized metaphors and metonymies have some notable functions to fulfill in the headlines. Chief among them are: (i) metaphors and metonymies foreground a pragmatically relevant or stylistically interesting aspect of the story, (ii) metaphors and metonymies guide pragmatic inferencing in text interpretation, and (iii) metonymies create referential variety and enhance cohesion and coherence.