THE PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF NEWS HEADLINES’ LANGUAGE (A CASE STUDY)

Abstract

The readability of a news report greatly depends on the “catchy” nature of the headline. The present paper studies news headlines based on their pragmatic, semantic and syntactic peculiarities, it analyzes how the headlines are linguistically organized and what kind of attention-seeking strategies the language owns that are used in the formation of a headline. Some of the results of a social survey conducted among the non-native speakers of the English language, who follow the English press, are introduced to reveal how ordinary news readers decode the messages conveyed in the headlines.