Résumés
Le discours et la généricité des titres à la une de la presse britannique ont fait l’objet d’une approche essentiellement lexicale et syntaxique. Cet article s’en démarque en proposant une analyse pragmatique en vue de dégager l’existence d’un sous-genre à part entière défini par une spécificité rhétorique dont la validité générique est mesurée à l’aune des théories relevant des domaines de l’analyse pragmatique et du genre. Cette mise en lumière de la visée pragmatique de ce type de discours où le lecteur est appelé à engager et interagir avec le texte et le socio-contexte, nous conduit à le distancier du genre purement journalistique à visée informative en proposant son rapprochement avec un autre genre à spécificité britannique, les mots-croisés cryptés.
Headline discourse and its genericity have traditionally been the focus of lexical- and syntactic-orientated analysis. In a departure from the purely linguistic approach, this article analyses British headline discourse from a pragmatic perspective with a view to establishing the existence of a sub-genre the rhetoric specificity of which is measured against proven pragmatic and genre analysis theories. The highlighting of the essentially pragmatic aspect of headline discourse, which calls upon the reader to engage and interact with text and socio-context, leads us to suggest it possesses closer affiliation to the cryptic crossword, another quintessentially British genre, rather than to conventional journalistic headline discourse essentially designed to inform.
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Extrait du texte
Ce document sera publié en ligne en texte intégral en novembre 2014.
Plan
1. Scope of study
2. Genre
3. Functions of headlines
4. Generic Headlines
4.1. Surface characteristics
4.2. Linguistic characteristics
4.3. Pragmatic characteristics
5. Headlinese: a sub-genre
5.1. Headlinese genericity
5.2. Degrees of headlinese opacity
5.3. Sources of headlinese opacity
5.3.1 Linguistic sources
5.3.2. Cultural sources
5.3.3. Context
5.4. Headlinese as shared discourse
6. Headlinese and discourse community
6.1. Speech and discourse communities
6.2. Swales’ 6-point definition of discourse community
Conclusion: journalistic or cryptic discourse?
Aperçu du texte
The headline – “one of the most distinctive features of a newspaper” according to David Crystal (1987: 388) – is a form of discourse specific to the written press. It is undoubtedly one of the most creative areas of journalistic writing and, in some aspects, comparable to poetry in that it borrows extensively from linguistic features generally associated with versification. As Don P. Brown and Doug Simpson (2002), copy editor and chief headline writer respectively, claim in their recommendations to future journalists, “Headline writers have to be the best writers at the newspaper.”
Headlines are also, according to specialists, the most widely read part of a newspaper – five times more than the body copy – since headlines are scanned not only by initial purchasers but also by the innumerable people in their immediate vicinity.
Arguments that the titles announced at the beginning of a TV or radio news bulletin may, to some extent, be considered as headlines are not retained in the fra...
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Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Shaeda Isani, « Of headlines & headlinese: Towards distinctive linguistic and pragmatic genericity », ASp [En ligne], 60 | 2011, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2014, consulté le 20 mai 2013. URL : http://asp.revues.org/2523 ; DOI : 10.4000/asp.2523
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