Heading as the object of linguistic research

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of newspaper heading on the material of English newspapers, it reveals classification of ‘English’ headings, the main functions of the English headings in modern newspaper journalism, stylistic and pragmatic features of headings. The first thing that the reader finds in the newspaper is the headings of newspaper publications, which are the first signal inducing to read the newspaper material. The importance of a heading in the plan of the impact on the reader is defined by the fact that this text element has a strong position. From the standpoint of psycholinguistics, heading is a set of key words that play the role of «semantic landmarks», accompanying understanding of the text with emotional and evaluative component and motivating the reader’s interest in the published material.
The relevance of studying the structure of newspaper headings is caused by the following reasons:
1) the increasing role of this phenomenon in modern society and those radical changes which it underwent in the last decades;
2) growing of pragmatic importance of heading in the conditions of modern mass media communication;
3) insufficient study of peculiar features of this phenomenon.