Headlines as subordinary speech acts: the genre-specificity of headlines

This study investigates if there are interrelations between pragmatic features of headlines and genres. Taking a starting point in Bazerman's (1994) theory of genre, the study assumes that there are dependency relations and divisions of labour between genres in a system of genres so that one genre serves one specific purpose of a socially organised activity and another genre serves another, and that the texts of a specific genre comprise various subacts which must contribute to the fulfilment of the typified purpose that the textual macro-act serves. Accordingly, headlines are considered to be subacts, i.e. illocutionary acts whose conditions of satisfaction (Searle 1996) are determined by the typified purpose of the text they form a part of (Borchmann 2014). This functional account suggests that the pragmatic features that characterise headlines may be genre-specific. The present study tests this hypothesis by means of two analyses: a comparative pragmatic analysis of 300 headlines from three different genres, and a comparative pragmatic analysis of 90 texts from three different genres. The comparative analysis of headlines focuses on the pragmatic features of headlines in terms of illocutionary point, commitment, subjectivity and common ground management. The comparative analysis of texts focuses on correlations between generic pragmatic features of headlines and the accepted purpose of the textual macro-act they form a part of. The material used in both surveys are headlines and texts of the genres news, analysis and column in the genre system of the Danish omnibus newspaper Politiken.
     The result of the comparative analysis of headlines is that it is possible to identify genre-specific pragmatic features of headlines. The result of the comparative analysis of texts is that there are correlations between generic pragmatic features of headlines and the accepted purpose of the textual macro-act they form a part of. On this basis, the distinctive conditions of satisfactions of each of the three illocutionary subacts news headline, analysis headline and column headline are stated.

References
Bazerman, C. 1994. Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions. A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.) Genre and the New Rhetoric, 79-104. London: Taylor & Francis.

Borchmann, S. 2014. The Perilous Life of a Linguistic Genre Convention. Europäische
Studien zur Textlinguistik, vol. 12, 45-112.

Searle, J. 1996. Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.