م. م. مثنى نجيب حميد المرسومي
Classification of Speech acts of Headlines
تصنيف افعال الكلام في عناوين الاخبار
م. م. مثنى نجيب حميد المرسومي
Language is a way of communicating meaning and executing an event, whether spoken or written. Language encourages individuals to express their ideas, feelings, emotions and expectations (Wierzbicka, 1992). Sentences are classified into four categories with respect to the function: statements, questions, commands and exclamations. Therefore, headline manufacturers coin headlines depending on the purpose of the sentence in order to express their specific and concise information. Headlines, then, can be classified in terms of function into four categories: statement headlines, question headlines, command headlines, and exclamation headlines.
A statement is a sentence which its primary purpose is knowledge transmission. It involves a topic preceded by a verb (Quirk et al., 1985). A statement sentence does have a declarative framework which is used to declare or allow knowing something (Crystal, 2011). A statement headline, then, is used to express knowledge transmission.
Questions are extremely strong and have a significant impact on the brain because they stimulate our interest. Therefore, the presence of a question mark in a question headline especially when a reader is not aware of what s/he will receive with merely a headline. Shams (2002) explains that a question headline encourages the reader to consider the proposed solution, hence comprehend the answer.
Directive Speech Acts seem to be the command headlines. They display the intention of the speaker to convince the receiver to act in a certain way. A command sentence is linguistically characterized by, as Crystal (2011) states, "a sentence which typically has no subject and where the verb is in the imperative mood" (p.83). Its primary role is to guide somebody to do something.
Exclamatory headlines are symbolic acts of speech when they represent the speaker's psychological state. The interaction between the speech act as well as the role of whole headline seems obvious after reading the speech act and any headline. This is in line with Searle's (1968) view that "Often we mean more than we actually say" journalists build headlines and mean further than they speak (p.415).
To conclude, in coining headlines, the use of language pragmatically plays a major role in expressing the invisible meaning with very few terms representing the writer's illocutionary force including his orientations. Then, correspondence between writer and reader can sometimes be recognized within pragmatics, speech acts. This is similar with the case when headlines serve particular problems and perform a multitude of speech acts such as promising, asserting, declaring, urging, warning, and informing.
Key words:
Statement headline, Question headline, Command headline, Exclamatory headline
Crystal, D. (2011). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics, John Wiley & Sons.
Quirk, R.; Greenbaum, S.; Leech, G. and Svartvik, J.(1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman Group Ltd.
Shams, M. A. (2002). Practice with Newspapers. Iran. Entesharat Jangle.
Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, culture, and cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations, Oxford University Press on Demand.