Presupposition in English news headlines: A Pragma-linguistic Study

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

المؤلف

English Language Lecturer at Faculty of Arts, South Valley University

المستخلص

Confronted with an overwhelming volume of news, readers often lack the time and energy to peruse every piece. News headlines serve as crucial aids in extracting the most pertinent and engaging information from the deluge of data. Serving as the core component of news, headlines aspire to succinctly encapsulate the main content, captivate attention, and kindle the desire to read further. Achieving these demands, headlines are characterized by conciseness, vividness, and attractiveness. Pragmatic presupposition emerges as a valuable tool in fulfilling these requirements, proving to be an effective device in the craft of news headline writing. Presupposition, a crucial concept in both semantic and pragmatic fields, signifies a pre-existing assumption. It denotes implicit assumptions made by communicators that are essential for accurately interpreting an utterance. While there is consensus that presupposition is a universal aspect of language, diverse viewpoints exist regarding its nature. This study endeavored to scrutinize the application of pragmatic presupposition in English news headlines, offering a fresh outlook for appreciating them and aiding readers in a more profound comprehension of news headlines. The study applied Levinson’s tool kit of presupposition triggers to investigate selected news headlines of some newspapers published in English on Egypt in the period from 2011 to 2013. In this period, Egypt went through many political and economic changes. Finally, the study concluded that news writers and editors utilized the linguistic tools triggering presuppositions to propagate their own ideological stances. Top of Form

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