ПРАГМАЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ ГАЗЕТНЫХ ЗАГОЛОВКОВ (НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ АНГЛИЙСКОЙ ГАЗЕТЫ “THE GUARDIAN’)

Today, with the development of modern technologies, in spite of the decline in readership and competition from the electronic media, the newspaper industry remains one of the most mobile and demanded in developed countries. The topics of newspaper publications are diverse and it affects all the spheres of public life. In a huge flow of information, it is sometimes difficult for even the most interested reader to choose a necessary newspaper article. A special role belongs to the newspaper headline, the first element of the text which the reader faces.

According to the scientists, the headline is closely connected with the main text (Belova Yu.A., Boldyreva E.F., Galperin I.R., Lazareva E.A., Shtykova N.V.), as well as it can be considered as a separate text with a certain independence (Arnold I.V., Komarov E.N.). A newspaper headline is a graphically minimized, potentially collapsed text icon, expressed verbally and non-verbally, with relative auto-semanticity [4, P. 794]. This is an original, unified element for the entire text, capable of providing an emotional and evaluative effect in order to make its reader get interested in the topic.

According to psychologists, about eighty percent of readers judge an article by its headline. It is the most informative and expressive pre-text communicative unit. It is the headline that helps you get acquainted with the communicative-pragmatic attitudes of the author. The newspaper headline is characterized by: informativeness, correspondence to the content and expressiveness.

The functions of a newspaper headline are determined by the main features of the journalistic style – to inform and influence the reader in a convincing way [5]. The reader becomes familiar with the headline at the pre-text stage of text perception. The main functions of newspaper headlines are: the graphic-highlighting function is realized by non-linguistic means (print size, print selection methods, colour, layout elements, etc.); the nominative function (naming) is revealed with the help of language means, helps the reader understand the topic and the intended content of the article; the pragmatic function (regulatory, emotionally expressive) is achieved by influencing the emotional-evaluative vocabulary on the psyche of the reader, forming a certain evaluative attitude and a desire to read this publication [3, P. 23], [8, P. 83, 87].

The analysis of newspaper headlines in the "Environment" section of the English newspaper "The Guardian" is carried out from the point of pragminguistics. Pragmatically speaking, a newspaper headline is created with a certain purpose. Creating the headline, the author deliberately chooses certain linguistic signs to achieve his communicative intention. The limited volume of the newspaper text forces the author to select linguistic means carefully and transform them in such a way as to influence the reader in the most effective way [1, P. 157], [2, P. 20], [9, P. 32-33].

"Environment" is considered to be a frequently read section of the English newspaper "The Guardian". Environmental issues such as climate change, air and water pollution, ozone depletion, deforestation, etc. still remain important and unsolved for society. After analyzing 1000 newspaper headlines in the “Environment” section, the following methods of creation were found:

– the absence of articles, auxiliary verbs, predicates to create dynamism and maximum information content (“Deadlock in Committee”; “Houses Smashed by Hurricane”; “No Timber for Sale”) [11];

– the use of Present Simple instead of the Past Simple Tense to bring the event closer to the reader and increase interest in it (“Influenza kills 200 in India”, “Blind girl climbs Everest”);

– the use of the verb in the infinitive form to create more expression. The event is important, the fact, not the time of its occurrence (“HSBC to pay $ 1.9 billion”, “Lloyds Banking Group to cut 700 jobs”);

– the omission of the subject to refer to the action itself (“Expect no change in North Korea”; “Expect New Economic Depression”);

– the use of popular names and surnames, nicknames in order to maximize the interest of the reader and draw his attention to the article. The authoritative personality is used as a “bait” for the reader: Ike = Eisenhower, Winnie = Winston Churchill, Teddy - Theodor Roosevelt (“Teddy Roosevelt First US President to Go Abroad”);

– the use of neologisms, dialectisms, slang to express their negative attitude to the event: “foe” instead of enemy, “litter” instead of policeman – (“Police Union Defends Philadelphia Cop Who Punched Woman”);

– the use of abbreviations to save space for the headline, as well as giving importance to the article. However, some of them are clear only after reading the article: HSBC - Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, NGOA - Next Generation Optical Access (“NGOA will facilitate new connectivity networks”).

– the use of rhetorical questions to give the headline an emotionally expressive colour and draw the reader's immediate attention to the solution of the problem (“Would you wear clothes made from rubbish?”; “Mushrooms and orange peel: could biotech clean up the building industry?”).

By the number of semantic scheme elements, newspaper headlines are unilateral (contain one semantic concept and do not have homogeneous members of the sentence) and complex (with several semantic elements [7, P. 96]. In the “Environment” section, there are mainly complex headings. They are aimed at informing the reader as much as possible: “Be a citizen scientist: track plastic waste, spot a spider monkey or beat coronavirus”, “Animals Farmed: pig virus, wildlife trade in China, and the 'poultry capital' of Wales”.

An important component of the pragmatic meaning of the newspaper headlines is evaluation, which forms the semantic component of the subjective modality of the author [6]. The evaluation can be used to determine the entire spectrum of social and political views that the author is guided by [10]. It is expressed in the deliberate use of nominative vocabulary of positive or negative connotation with a pragmatic attitude towards the formation of a certain perception in the reader, evaluative adjectives and adverbs, the superlative degree of adjectives. (“Infrastructure inadequate for climate emergency, experts warn”; “Litigation is a powerful tool in the environmental crisis”; “UK facing worst wheat harvest since 1980s, says farmers’ union”).

A pragmatic analysis of the “Environment” section made it possible to divide the newspaper headlines into three groups and present them as a percentage:

1) Narrative headline (42%). It is often used to cover the environmental news. By this headline it is easy for the reader to understand what the article will be about. It is as informative as possible. (“UK greenhouse gas emissions fall for seventh year in a row”, “Electric cars produce less CO2 than petrol vehicles, study confirms”);

2) Summary-headline (33%). It contains the commentary or opinion of the author on the events in the article. It expresses the subjective judgement of the author about the article. The headlines with a negative author's judgement sometimes shock the reader with their scandalous mood (“Australia's aluminum sector is on life support. It can and should be saved”, “The government must abandon its fossil fuel power projects. If not, we’ll sue”);

3) Statement-headline with the involvement of an authoritative personality (25%). The author of the article refers to a famous person intentionally and uses his/her effective phrase to draw the reader's attention to this article. Such a headline has a strong emotional and evaluative effect on the reader (“'Extinction is a choice': Margaret Atwood on Tasmania's forests and saving the swift parrot”, “Scott Morrison and the big lie about climate change: does he think we're that stupid ? ”,“ Anthony Albanese denounces 'lazy cynicism' of Nationals in appeal to NSW coal country ”).

The main event in 2020 is coronavirus (Covid-19). In the "Environment" section, most of the headlines (50-60%) belong to this urgent topic. The words Covid-19 and coronavirus are used in each of the different types of headlines and act as “a bait” to draw the reader's attention: “Covid-19 cannot be used to justify more austerity”; "Are children less susceptible to coronavirus?"

Thus, the newspaper headline is an important element of the newspaper article, acting as a mediator between the media text and the reader, an incentive to read the main information in the article and an effective means of persuading to agree with the author of the article which requires a high level of language proficiency from the author-publicist.