Topicality as War News Value: A Pragma – Linguistic Study (original) (raw)

A Pragmatic Study of CNN and BBC News Headlines Covering the Syrian Conflict

Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2018

Lately, there has been a growing interest in media. As a result, many trends are found from both the academic and industrial points of view. News channels, for example, play an important role in transmitting news about political situations, military events and other issues to people all over the world. The language used in news reports or even in their headlines is very influential in attaining the communicative intent of such news reports. This language is characterized by various linguistic features. One aspect of those features is the pragmatic one. This latter issue has not been given its due attention in research study. Precisely, the use of speech acts as a basic component of pragmatics has not been sufficiently tackled in research work in this regard. Thus, the present study attempts to fill this gap and investigate the types of speech acts employed in CNN and BBC headlines that represent the Syrian conflict. Fifty-six headlines are selected from each of these news channels -...

Pragmatics of Political News Reports Worthiness

International Journal of English Linguistics

With the numerousness of political events and the competition among news media channels, news manufacturing becomes highly weighty to attract audience's attention aiming at changing their minds. As such, news reporters tend to pick out certain events that can be viewed as newsworthy. However, news manufacturing turns to be the reporters’ main interest and the various ways used to fulfill this purpose fall into their primary tasks. Among these ways, pragmatic mechanisms of language stand as the most appropriate means to create such newsworthiness. Thus, this study has set itself the task to be after these pragmatic mechanisms as employed by CNN reporters in their attempts to initiate, construct and maximize newsworthiness of the events in question. The findings attained at by this study fully verify some of its hypotheses and partially vindicate other ones.

Towards a pragma-linguistic framework for the study of sensationalism in news headlines

Discourse & Communication, 2013

This article sets out a framework for a language-oriented analysis of sensationalism in news media. Sensationalism is understood here as a discourse strategy of 'packaging' information in news headlines in such a way that news items are presented as more interesting, extraordinary and relevant than might be the case. Unlike previous content analyses of sensational coverage, this study demonstrates how sensationalism is instantiated through specific illocutions, semantic macrostructures, narrative formulas, evaluation parameters, and interpersonal and textual devices. Examples are drawn from a corpus of headlines of the 'most read' articles in the online outlet of the British mid-market tabloid Daily Mail compiled in early 2012. Sensationalized instances are identified through surveys and focus group discussions and subsequently analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The study is located within the context of media scholarship on news values and current trends in journalism.

Pragmatic and Semantic Potential of Newspaper Headlines

US-China Foreign Language, 2016

This paper aims at throwing a light on the interrelationship of pragmatics and semantics in terms of avoiding misunderstanding and miscommunication between the speaker/writer and hearer/reader. For this purpose, we restrict the sphere with the analysis of headlines from BBC news whose meanings are interpreted by using presuppositional and entailment techniques. Although semantics is concerned only with the literal meaning of the words and their interrelations, pragmatic usage pays attention to the importance of the so called inferred meaning that the speakers and listeners perceive. Presupposition and entailment refer to two different aspects of information. In presupposition, it is the speakers' circumstantial knowledge while in entailments, it is a conclusion that speakers arrive as a definite type of consequence. Headlines subjectively give clues about or express the most important aspect of the text combining in themselves both semantic and pragmatic meanings and for our analysis of discourse, we will refer to media as a specific form of discourse that is itself a power resource and how media can influence people's minds, e.g., their knowledge or opinions, revealing integration of among which is the major concerns of the paper. The study, with this in mind, explores the potential of semantics and pragmatic modules introduced by T.

The Language in News Discourse

1 3 / 0 5 / 2 0 1 5 As people living in a globalized world, it is necessary to be informed about the events happening all over the world. For that aim, newspapers bring citizens the more accurate information about every problem that occurs in any part of the Earth. However, some news can be related in a biased point of view, especially looking at ideology or at language features. That is why in this project, the same report has been used by different newspapers, they are Friends pay tribute after four killed in Powys car crash published by The Guardian on 9 th March 2015, and Two more teenagers killed in tragic weekend on roads published by Ian Johnson in i 1 The essential daily briefing from The Independent on 9 th March of 2015. The aim of this project is to show how the different features in a report work in different newspaper.

PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF PUBLICISTIC HEADLINES

MENTAL ENLIGHTENMENT SCIENTIFIC -METHODOLOGICAL JOURNAL, 2023

Pre-translation journalistic text analysis is an integral part of an efficient translation procedure in mass media. In fact, it focuses on collecting information on the text under translation. Collecting the intra-textual information is mainly based on a thorough analysis of the source text pragmatic peculiarities, whereas the extra-textual information focuses basically on the communicative functional properties of both source and target texts. There exist different approaches towards this procedure and the stages of its accomplishment. Nonetheless, it should be noted that they all lead to a broader spectrum of discourse analysis with its intra-textual and extra-textual parameters and give birth to the translationoriented pragmatic analysis before initiating translation process itself. The article focuses on the interrelation and interaction of all the mentioned types of analysis (pragmatic analysis, pretranslation analysis) as an essential requirement for a relevant translation of headlines.

CONSTRUCTING REALITIES ON WAR IN PRINT MEDIA DISCOURSE

The paper deals with an analysis of the reporting of two Montenegrin daily newspapers (Pobjeda and Dan) on NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia in 1999, an event that still has a huge impact on the political scene of Montenegro. The analysis was based on van Dijk's theory on news schemata and Fairclough's and van Dijk's approaches to critical discourse analysis. The analysis has shown that the two analysed dailies, due to their different political and ideological orientations, created two different 'realities' of the same event, using different strategies in the text structure at the macro level, the selection of lexical and syntactic elements at the micro level and in the interpretation of events. This type of reporting has had a negative impact on the political scene of Montenegro on both the decisions made on the independence of the country in 2006 and the support for the NATO membership of Montenegro.

Linguistic Legitimation of Political Events in Newspaper Discourse

Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2016

This paper examines the discursive structures employed in legitimizing the event of U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq and identifies them in relation to linguistic features. It attempts to describe the relation between language use and legitimation discursive structures in depicting political events. The paper focuses on the political event of U.S. forces' withdrawal from Iraq in the English newspaper issued in Iraq. The study shows the way in which journalists express their values and attitudes concerning this critical event. Consequently, this requires a critical discourse analysis (henceforth, CDA) to analyse news articles in the Iraqi English newspaper: The Kurdish Globe (henceforth, KG) newspaper. Accordingly, the study presents a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles to identify the legitimation discursive structures and their linguistic features. It is found that the main discursive structures of legitimation employed in the KG newspaper are: authorization, rationalization, and moral evaluation. Besides, there were five verb processes used to represent this legitimation, including material, verbal, relational, mental, and existential.