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QUALITY PRESS DISCOURSE: THE ROLE OF HEADLINES

Yelena O. Mendzheritskaya, Ph.D.,
Faculty of Philology, English Department
Lomonosov Moscow State University




THIS PAPER is devoted to the language of mass media and the problem of its teaching to the students of English as a foreign language. It deals only with quality press, the choice of which for the purposes of analysis (and teaching) is justified by the fact that it does not only suggest information on various aspects of life all over the world but also provides us with the examples of appropriate modern language usage.

In fact, people choose the material for reading browsing through the headlines of the articles. That is why I’ve decided to concentrate on the headlines and to find out their role in presenting linguistic information relevant for teaching purposes.

Thus, what`s in a headline? Does it reflect the content of an article or does it just try to attract the attention of a reader? Looking through the headlines one comes to a conclusion that they are aimed at impact rather than comprising information suggested in the article. It is difficult to glean any information from such titles (borrowed from “The Economist”) as:

Slippery slope
Preying on Prodi
Pitta v Pitta
Country cousins
Excise exiles
Kumble humbles
Engine ingenuity
Barbarians at Bawarians’ gates
Sense and non-scents


These titles do not actually inform the reader about the subjects of the articles themselves. Nevertheless, one can learn a lot from them. About all sorts of phonetic play such as alliteration, assonance, rhyming, sound symbolism. And being the teachers of English we can successfully teach all these linguistic devices to our students.

Such titles as
 Globespan
 Dysfunctional
 Certifiable
 Inconceivable?
 Telekomplicated
 No PERVersion
 Cloudbusting
 Generali-ssimo
make it difficult to guess which particular subject may be unveiled in these articles but provide us with the material for teaching word-building patterns in English. Among these headlines one can find both words formed according to productive patterns and registered in the dictionaries  (such as certifiable, inconceivable) and new coinages like “globespan” (referring to the emerging markets) or “Telekomplicated” (in which the name of the company Telekom merges together with the word “complicated”).

Thus, with the help of the newspaper articles’ titles it is possible to master phonetics and lexicology. And not only that.

Let us consider one more group of headlines containing allusions to popular notions and sayings:

The year of the mouse
Olive branches
Shock treatment
Black hole
Liberty, equality, humility.


Their adequate interpretation presupposes overlapping (if not to say coincidence) of cognitive bases (or background knowledge) of the participants of communication. As for the first title (“The year of the mouse”) one should know that it deals with eastern horoscope. “Olive branches”, “Shock treatment”, “Black hole” introduce popular notions applied to some other spheres of life in a figurative sense, thus becoming metaphors.

The last title in this group “Liberty, equality, humility” inevitably rings the bell of  “Liberty, equality, fraternity”, the motto of the French revolution, distorted and played upon by the authors of the article.

So, with the help of these titles one can expand socio-cultural background knowledge as a prerequisite of adequate interpretation and understanding of information, which follows the title.

Some headlines allude to the titles of works of literature or films, musicals or well-known quotations from them:

Crime without punishment (“Crime and Punishment” Dostoyevsky)
Room at the bottom (“Room at the Top” John Braine)
A tale of two countries
A tale of two debtors (“A tale of Two Cities” Charles Dickens)
Taming Leviathan («The Taming of the Shrew» William Shakespeare)
The French Lender’s Woman («The French Lieutenant’s Woman» John Fowles)
The Prince and the Pauper («The Prince and the Pauper» Mark Twain)
The Importance of Breakfast («The Importance of being Earnest» Oscar Wilde)
Paradise Threatened in Mauritius («Paradise Lost» John Milton)
Women, Work and the Family («Women, Fire and Dangerous Things» George Lakoff)
The silence of the lambs
The unbearable lightness of finance
 Once upon a time on Wall Street
 New York, New York (Act II)
In this case the ability of a reader (and a student of English) to decipher the underlying metaphors depends on the so-called shared code of sender and receiver of information.

It is also possible to teach connotations, idioms, set expressions and all sorts of metaphors and specific devices, like for example oxymoron (a combination of words which seem to contradict each other), with the help of such titles as:

A stitch in time
Food for talk
Red ink, redder faces
Needles in giant haystacks
No ivory towers
A pig of a problem
Organized panic
Legal robbery
Curative killer
Unsecret agent
Consistently inconsistent
It may seem that all those features mentioned characterize only  “The Economist”. But if you look through such editions as “Time” and “Newsweek” (to mention a few) you will find the same tendencies. A handful of headlines will illustrate the point:
 “Time”      Market mania in Cyprus
   A Gallic grocery giant
    Message from a mouse
    Buy one, get one free?
    Conflict of interest
   Life after death
    Doers and shapers
      Schools for Scandal
 “Newsweek” Jobless in Java, booming in Bali?
    Brave reform effort reaps its reward
    In-your-face polities
    Looking for a steady hand
    Looking for a soft landing
    Pulling back the curtain
    Taking out the trash


It should be mentioned that Russian quality press also favours language play and sometimes even employs English words and concepts. For example:
 

Step äà  step êðóãîì
 Áàéêè î Bike
 PR- îñòîòà ëó÷øå âîðîâñòâà
 Àëåêñàíäð Èçîñèìîâ. Æèçíü íà MARSe
These examples are borrowed from the magazine “Êàðüåðà” and show the distortion of national-cultural mental stereotypes (called cognitive stereotypes) and the introduction of new ideas to the Russian language speakers.

Thus, the features traced are characteristic of a quality press discourse in general, providing we treat ‘discourse’ as a cognitive process reflecting our thinking with the help of linguistic means of a particular language and taking into consideration extra-linguistic reality. Being cognitive process discourse incorporates the characteristic features of accumulating, storing and presenting information together with the characteristic features of its perception. In order to be able to perceive information one needs to possess some background knowledge and a set of concepts at one’s disposal which are shared by all the members of a particular national community and, certainly, are reflected in quality journalism as a type of discourse.

It follows, then, that teaching quality press discourse presupposes not only attention to linguistic means of expressing one’s thoughts at all linguistic levels (phonetic, lexical, semantic, syntactic, stylistic) but also to universal and culture-specific background knowledge which allows us to understand foreign national discourse adequately and master language.

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