A Contrastive Analysis of Headlines in Native & Nonnative

English Newspapers
Maryam Yadegarfard
Islamic Azad University of Larestan branch
February, 2014
m.yadegarfard@yahoo.com
Abstract
Many EFL students find that newspaper headlines are especially
difficult to understand. This is because, as Fairclough (1995) says,
"headlines have distinctive syntactic properties, which make them a
grammatical oddity" (p. 21). The headline is a unique type of text. It has a
range of functions that specifically dictate its shape, content and structure, and
it operates within a range of restrictions that limit the freedom of the writer .In
light of this view, this review intends to survey those CA studies of English
headlines in newspapers published in a native and nonnative country, which
have found out the problems that students face in writing and translating
headlines .It first consider the distinction between different types of newspaper
texts and headlines . Then in order to solve the challenge, a summary of recent
works and previous investigations on contrastive analysis of native and
nonnative English newspaper headlines is presented

I.

Introduction
Mass media is one of the most powerful forces for shaping public opinion. Newspaper

editorials, as a subgenre of the newspaper genre (Bell, 1991), are of importance in news
discourse. Headlines in editorials, as an opening section to their relevant main text, have been
ascribed different functions. Discussing the news schema, van Dijk (1988) has referred to
headlines and leads as categories forming the summary of the news reports. Bell (1991) &
Nir (1993 cited in Bonyadi, 2012) have made a distinction between headlines functioning as
the abstract of the main event of the story and headlines as promoting one of the details of the
story. Lindemann (1990 cited in Bonyadi, 2012) argues that, although in most cases headlines
do bear such functions in news reports, some newspapers headlines present their readers with
fairly complex riddles which neither summarize nor present the detail of the news reports.

Bonyadi.A(2012) points out that, newspaper headlines not only have the function of
indicating the topic and summarizing the main content of the news text, but they also try to
help the reader grasp the meaning of the text. In an attempt to address the question of the
communicative function of headlines, Dor (2003) has further transcended the different
functions of the headlines and defined them as "relevance optimizers" that are designed to
optimize the relevance of their stories for the readers (p. 696).
Headlines play an important role in the communicative act performed by newspapers.
They are used, in Taiwo's (2007) terms, "to initiate, sustain and shape discourse on the views
of readers" (p. 244). Thus, they have been studied by a few journalists and researchers.
Straumann (1935 cited in Bonyadi, 2012), pioneer of headline studies, considers the language
of headlines as an autonomous language which is the subject of linguistic analysis.
Khodabandeh.F (2007) stated that the style of writing headlines is largely geared to
saving space and presenting information in striking ways. English newspaper headlines have
their own special rules and regulations. Since they are the gist of the news, the language is
compressed and condensed which challenges not only the English language learners but also
some native speakers.
Mrdh (1980), in a study of linguistic features in the headlines of English newspapers,
identified the following features as typical of headlines: the omission of articles; the omission
of verbs and of auxiliaries; nominalizations; the frequent use of complex noun phrases in
subject position; adverbial headlines, with the omission of both verb and subject; the use of
short words; the widespread use of puns, word play, and alliteration; the importance of word
order, with the most important items placed first; and independent "wh" constructions not
linked to a main clause (e.g., Why the French don't give a damn).

II.

Different newspaper texts

Different newspaper texts namely: service information, opinion and news would both

semantically and pragmatically require certain types of the headlines based on the text and
the receiver and reader (Bell, 1991).
However, most of the studies on the headlines focused on either service information
texts such as advertisement or new texts such as daily news reports. In other words, the role
and function of the headlines in opinion texts have rarely been explicated in the literature(van
Dijk, 1995) . Newspaper editorials as a kind of opinion texts are different from the other
types of news discourse in that they are supposed to present evaluations and comments about
the news events already reported in the newspapers.
According to Bonyadi (2012) the issue of determining the role of the headlines would
be much more complicated if one considers the kind of newspaper texts in which the
headlines appear .Thus, due to the unique features of headlines such as encapsulating the
content of the editorials, arousing the readers curiosity (Reah, 2002), and also their important
role in monitoring readers attention, perception, and reading process (van Dijk, 1988)
Bonyadi in his study attempted to conduct a systematic contrastive textual analysis of
English and Persian editorial headlines to investigate the kind of rhetorical strategies the two
newspapers use for propagating their preferred ideologies .He is also hoped that such
knowledge would assist language teachers to effectively use newspapers as a teaching device
in their EFL/ESL (English as a second language) classrooms.
This study has been done on 20 culled from the electronic version of the Iranian
English newspaper, TT, and 20 editorial headlines culled from the electronic version of the

English daily newspaper, the NYT out of a large pool of editorials published daily over a
specific span of time [April to September, 2008] ( Bonyadi, 2013) .
For selecting the editorial headlines to be included in the corpus, Bonyadi used the
classification proposed by Hall (2001). Based on the proposed classification, it is possible to
sort the newspaper editorials into editorials of Criticism, Attack, Defense, Endorsement,
Praise, Appeal, and Entertainment. Editorials of criticism are defined here as editorials that
aimed at criticizing policies and decisions that are considered as controversial by the
newspaper staff. Since editorials of criticism are very similar to the editorials of attack, which
are supposed to be much more forceful and call for changes to be made immediately (Hall,
p. 159), the two kinds of editorials in the corpus have been referred to as editorials of
criticism.
Bonyadi.A (2012) considered the manipulative nature of presupposition (is any
proposition whose truth is accepted by the speaker . . . but not asserted by the utterance (van
Dijk, 1995, p. 273)). and the rhetorical devices, the selected headlines have been analyzed in
terms of presupposition and the emerging rhetorical devices namely parallelism, alliteration,
consonance, metonymy, pun, testimonial, quotation out of context, allusion, neologism,
antithesis, and irony.
Headlines can be structurally classified as either verbal or nonverbal. Verbal headlines
are those that contain a verbal clause. Nonverbal headlines are those that contain a noun or a
nominal phrase. The analysis of the headlines in the selected editorials of the two newspapers
revealed certain differences between the two sets of headlines. In terms of verbal/nonverbal
distinction, the proportion of verbal headlines in the NYT (25%) was significantly lower than
that in TT (60%).

Bonyadi.A (2012) in his analysis found that, TT writers inclined to form the headlines in full
sentences, while those in NYT preferred short and punchy phrases. Moreover, in terms of the
length of the headlines, verbal and nonverbal headlines in the NYT were written using short
phrases whereas the TT headlines were in the form of comparatively long phrases and
sentences .The analysis of the selected headlines in terms of presupposition revealed some
similarities and differences between the headlines of the two papers.
As reported in the findings of the Khodabandeh (2007a), this (using full sentences in
the headlines) indicated that unlike the headlines in the NYT, Persian headlines were not
different from those of ordinary, non-headline language. These findings did not confirm the
findings of the study conducted by Khodabandeh (2007b) who claimed, as a result of her
study, that the proportion of verbal headlines were considerably higher in English headlines
(94.82%) than in the Persian ones (24.27%).
In general, the writers in the two papers presupposed particular propositions through
certain types of presuppositions, namely, existential and lexical .The TT headlines compared
with those of the NYT contained more existential presuppositions. The NYT headlines, on the
other hand, contained more lexical presuppositions.
This subjective presentation of the news events and the news actors were carried out by
using certain textual and persuasive strategies. The analysis in general revealed that the
editorial writers in both newspapers aimed at not only informing the readers of the topic of
the editorial, but also expressing the preferred ideology of the papers which was
accomplished through using certain persuasive and rhetorical devices.

III.

Empirical Research on the Topic

According to Ungerer (2000 cited in Roohani, 2010) a headline "describes the essence of
a complicated news story in a few words .It informs quickly and accurately and arouses the
reader's curiosity" (p. 48) .To move further, the headline is more than a semantic summary of
the story and a pragmatic attracting-device for the reader.It is, in Dors (2003) terms, "a
communicative device whose function is to produce the optimal level of affinity between the
content of the story and the readers context of interpretation" (p. 720) .
However, as Reah (2002) states, the problematic issue for us is that language of headlines
is special and has its own characteristics on the lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical levels for its
brevity, attractiveness, and clarity. Headline writers have developed a vocabulary that fulfills
the requirements of the headline, using words that are short, attention-grabbing, and effective.
They use a range of language devices to make their headlines memorable and striking.

As observed, foreign learners of English in Iran confront great challenge in

comprehending headlines of English newspapers .According to Roohani & Esmaeili(2010)
this claim is particularly made when EFL learners begin to read the headlines in sports
sections of newspapers, which have high readership among young EFL learners, but demand
specific syntactic and lexical features. They are sometimes confused about the way in which
elements within a sports headline are ordered.
To move further, sometimes some linguistic differences between the headlines in the
different English newspapers such as those published outside and inside Iran are observed.
They believe that Understanding the linguistic differences and similarities between different
English newspapers are important for Iranian EFL learners, who should read both Iranian and
non-Iranian English newspapers, since reading or translating newspaper headlines,

particularly sports headlines, is not just a matter of vocabulary, but understating the style and
genre of headlines.
A. Roohani & M. Esmaeili (2010) investigated linguistic syntactic and lexical
features of the sport-section headlines in newspapers, which seem to be problematic for
Iranian EFL learners. To this end, the study compares and contrasts the headlines in 2 daily
newspapers: The Times (a non-Iranian English newspaper published outside Iran) and Tehran
Times (an Iranian English newspaper published inside Iran). The analysis of the data showed
that there are some quantitative similarities and differences between the two corpora obtained
from the sports sections of The Times and Tehran Times newspapers. The headlines of the
two languages were similar in several lexical and syntactic features. In both newspapers, the
preference was given to the active voice of the verbs.
Also, as it was expected, the corpora from both newspapers indicated a preference for
lexical content words, particularly nouns, partly because the sports headline writers would
like to include much meaning in a limited space. The results also indicated that both Iranian
and non-Iranian English newspapers showed a preponderance of the simple present tense in
the finite clauses. Besides, both newspapers were similar in the nonoccurrence of adverbial
headlines, frequent use of statement headlines, and preponderance of unmodified and
premodified nominal headlines.
Finally A. Roohani & M. Esmaeili(2010) indicate that language of Iranian
newspapers resembles the authentic language of English newspapers and such newspapers
have a legitimate place in EFL curriculum development in Iran. Nonetheless, some linguistic
differences were observed in the corpora from the two newspapers. Tehran Times made use
of more proper nouns, perhaps, because explicitness was so important for the writers of sports
headlines. It is assumed that through proper nouns, writers of Iranian newspapers can make

information explicit. On the other hand, the command type of headline was quite absent in
the corpora obtained from Tehran Times. The headlines in the two newspapers were
significantly different just for the complexity, operationalized in terms of the number of
predictions and types of clauses.
Khodabandeh and Tahririan (2007) conducted a contrastive analysis (CA) between the
newspaper headlines of English and Persian languages in order to find the major similarities
and differences between them. Utilizing CA, they analyzed the variability of syntactic and
lexical features across and within a one-week corpus of the English and Persian newspaper
headlines. The conclusion was that the headlines of English and Persian languages were
similar in using dynamic verbs, active voice, short words, declarative sentences, finite
clauses, and simple sentences and different in the use of tense forms, headline types,
modification, and omission of words.
A study have been done by Khodabandeh.F (2007) that, analyzes students' errors in
translating headlines, on Fifty-eight male and female graduate students of English
from the universities of Isfahan . For the analysis of the errors extracted from the
translated Persian headlines, the linguistic taxonomy of errors provided by
Keshavarz (1993) was taken into consideration and for the analysis of students'
errors drawn from the translated English and Persian headlines; the lexical and
syntactic features of headlines were applied.

The analysis of the translated Persian headlines

Two different procedures were used for the analysis of the translated Persian

headlines in Khodabandeh.F (2007) study. First, they were analyzed according to the rules

of the English common core grammar and secondly according to the headlines language,
Syntactico-morphological errors & Lexico-semantic errors
The results of her research indicate that the graduate students had grammatical and
lexical errors in their translations from Persian into English .Their errors which led to
misinterpretation of ideas conveyed in headlines divided into two parts, namely global (those
which inhibit understanding) and local (those which do not interfere with communication)
errors. The participants' global errors resulted from inadequate lexical knowledge, and use of
typical Persian constructions. Most local errors, on the other hand, were caused by misuse
and omission of prepositions, articles, auxiliaries, lack of subject-verb agreement, and faulty
lexical choice.
They translated the Persian headlines into simple sentences by using the articles, copula
and noun possessive's, instead of omitting them. The analysis also reveals that the use of the
tense forms in the translated Persian headlines was not in accordance to the English headline
tense rules .The research results show that the participants' chief difficulties in
translating English headlines into Persian sentences were grammatical followed by
discoursal and lexical types. Their grammatical errors resulted from the translation
of tense forms and use of declarative sentences instead of interrogative ones.

Prkov (2009, cited in Roohani & Esmaeili, 2010) attempted to identify the most
frequently used grammatical features and structures that would occur in British newspaper
headlines to see whether the structure of headlines would differ from that of the common core
which is stylistically unmarked. The result of the study indicated no significant differences
between the language of headlines and common core structures despite the fact that a few
features such as abbreviated structures and the frequent use of verb forms were observed

more in the newspaper headlines. He concluded that there might be a core grammar of British
newspaper headlines which would be used almost equally by both types of newspapers.

IV.

Conclusion
The media is the whole body of communications that reach large numbers of the

public via radio, television, movies, magazines, newspapers, and the World Wide Web.
Among the written type, as Reah (2002) states, newspapers, partly due to easy acceptability
and wide range of content such as news, opinions, editorials, comment columns,
entertainment features and sports, have the most readers. As Shams (2007) states,
"newspapers present news through three kinds of codes: typographic, graphic and linguistic"
(p. 13).
The most important code to convey the meaning, both connotative and denotative, to
the reader is linguistic one which refers to the linguistic signs, that is, words, phrases, and
sentences. . Headlines are as the most important parts of news which encapsulates the story in
a minimum number of words, attracts the reader to the story and, if it appears on the front
page, attracts the reader to the paper (Reah, 1998).
A few studies of headlines aforementioned intended to discover some linguistic
features in the headlines of different languages, particularly English, or different types of
newspapers to see whether similar features could be observed. However, there is still more
need for further research with regard to headlines in different types of newspapers and in
different contexts
The results of the CA of the headlines of the two English newspapersone Iranian
and one non-Iranianhave important practical and pedagogical implications for both L2
teaching and translation. It can help L2 teachers to notice the structural differences of

headlines in order to lead L2 Learners toward a better understanding of the language of the
headlines, which tend to be important. As Dor (2003) points out, skilled newspaper readers
spend most of their reading time scanning the headlines, rather than reading the whole
newspaper stories as they "render the stories optimally-relevant" and help the readers get the
maximum from the minimum cognitive investment (p. 708).
Thus, the linguistic knowledge of headlines can be useful for the L2 readers of any
stories. Indeed, a good teacher of journalistic English is the one with relevant contrastive
information, even on different types of newspapers, since in this way he or she will know the
real learning problems of students in reading journalistic texts and, as such, can provide better
teaching. The reviews of these studies also suggest that Iranian English newspapers are good
instructional materials which represent authentic language and should be included in
academic courses such as Reading Comprehension, Reading Journalistic Texts, and
Translating English Texts, which are parts of EFL curriculum in Iran.

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