Newspaper headlines as a tool for linguistic modeling of police image

Abstract

The article considers the issue of linguistic modeling of the image of the police in the newspa[1]per discourse, in newspaper headlines in particular. This article is relevant and determined by the need to study the representation of reality in the media discourse and its linguistic manifestation. In addition, the media have recently paid close attention to the coverage of the activities of social institutions, especially with regard to law enforcement agencies. The authors describe the characteristics of the mass media discourse as one of the tools for implementing public power, organizing the activities of political and social institutions, and forming an image. The paper considers the specific features and functions of the newspaper discourse, and also considers the newspaper headline, which acts as a pragmatic component of a newspaper article contributing to the creation of information and social mediation between addressees and addressers in order to exert a regulatory influence on public opinion. The article focuses on the structural, semantic and stylistic analysis of the newspaper headlines that represent information about law enforcement agencies’ activities in Russia and the United States. The authors divide the publications into neutral (“Arguments and Facts”, “USA Today”, “Wall Street Journal”), pro-government (“Newspaper. Ru”, “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” and “Moskovsky Komsomolets”, “Associated Press”) and opposition newspapers (“Novaya Gazeta”, “Kommersant”, “The New York Times”, “Washington Post”). In total, 60 newspaper headlines were analyzed for the period from September to December 2020. The results show that the texts of newspaper reports perform informative and pragmatic functions, and the newspaper headline is the key to understanding the author’s position and intentions. Lexical, grammatical, and stylistic differences in the headlines of Russian and American newspapers devoted to the activities of law enforcement agencies were identified, as well as language techniques for exerting speech influence on the reader and linguistic modeling of the police image.