SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF NEWSPAPERS HEADLINES IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC

Abstract

Newspaper headlines are of great importance. They are traditionally written in a way that departs from normal conventional grammatical rules. The reason is to spice up and attract more readerships which require a special skill to disambiguate them. The current study aims at investigating the grammatical nature of newspaper headlines in English and Arabic. The objective are as follows: 1) To analyse the grammatical structure of newspaper headlines in Arabic and English. 2) To identify the frequency of each grammatical structure and its functional type (statement, questios, commands, and exclamations) in both languages. Various front page headlines will be extracted from a major English and a major Arabic newspaper circulated during the month of November 2018. The analytical framework of Quirk and et al. (1973) and Lee 2009 will be adopted for analyzing the structural pattern of the newspaper headlines in Arabic and English. The findings of the study would shed light on similarities and differences of news headlines cross-linguistically.