A Comparative WH-Syntactic Analysis of Dawn and BBC E-Newspaper Headlines

Abstract

Readers first come across headlines in a newspaper. However, it is found that journalistic discourse shows syntactic deviations in news reporting. The WH-clause in headings exhibit different functions of declarative statements and rhetoric questions. Studies discovered that syntactic constructions of WH-statements in newspaper headlines pique curiosity, eagerness and attentiveness among readers. Nevertheless, no substantive analysis has been conducted to present the syntactic comparison of a national Dawn and an international BBC e-newspaper headlines with WH-clauses. The present study compares the syntactic construction of 20 WH-statements using stratified sampling, 10 from each e-paper following Noam Chomsky’ Minimalist Program (MP). Results indicated that most of the WH-statements in news headlines have few syntactic deviation. All the headlines carried WH-words including what, why, how, and whose. All the statements were either rhetorical questions or declarative statements. The voice was kept active. Similarly, in most of the sentences subject-auxiliary inversion was observed while few statements explicit syntactic reduction of question mark “?”, and auxiliary verb. Hardly, 1-2 sentences showed subject omission. Almost in 2-3 statements phrases were added before WH-words. Future researchers, students, teachers, linguists can use this research for better understanding and knowledge of WH-syntactic construction in journalistic discourse. Therefore, these headlines engage readers by manipulating their ideologies. Additionally, future researchers can analyze and compare more Pakistani and international English or other languages WH-headlines of newspaper. Future researchers could determine more syntactic deviations in newspaper headlines.