Some peculiar features of military articles headlines in English press

Abstract

This article focuses on some lexical and stylistic peculiarities in the headlines of the military articles in English. At the beginning of the article it describes the main functions of the headlines of newspaper articles and their aims in modern printed and electronic publications. The author mentions nominative and informative, evaluative, advertising and esthetic functions which are not isolated, but interconnected in the newspaper headline as a media text. Further the text of the article deals with stylistic analysis, the author considers scientific and technical functional style together with official and business one, at the crossroads of which the style of writing the headlines is. Characteristic features of both styles are given. Official and business style gives military texts and headlines corresponding language character, logic, exactness, clarity, objectivity, concreteness, austerity. At the same time scientific and technical style is united with headlines by the usage of terminology, connected with warfare. In this research the morphological, syntactic, lexical, grammatical features of building headlines in the military articles in English are analyzed using the examples of headlines taken from The Guardian, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, The Times. The article also explains the attraction of military headlines by the usage of such unusual language structures as stylistic devices. Some stylistic devices are mentioned and defined, such as alliteration, speech and language epithets, metaphor, allusion. Examples of them are given. These are language constructions which help to make the headline interesting and memorable.