TRUMPOJO TEKSTO ŽANRO SPECIFIKA: NAUJIENŲ PORTALŲ ANTRAŠČIŲ TYRIMAS
THE PARTICULARITY OF THE SHORT TEXT GENRE: A STUDY OF HEADLINES IN NEWS PORTALS

Summary/Abstract: An analysis of text genres is essential for a better understanding of texts, as well as for a better understanding of language through them. This paper concentrates on a specific group, vast and miscellaneous, of text genres – on short text genres. They are specific in their greater or lesser constraint on the size, and therefore it is assumed that the influence of the genre should one way or another be particularly evident in such texts – both in their linguistic structure and in their contents. One of the text genres of this group – headlines in the news portals – is the subject of this study. The study is aimed at exploring the structure and contents of headlines in news portals and identifying their peculiarities that could be generalized precisely as under the influence of the particularity of the genre. Ten Lithuanian news portals are the sources of this study: 15min.lt, alfa.lt, balsas.lt, bernardinai. lt, delfi.lt, kauno.diena.lt, lrytas.lt, lzinios.lt, respublika.lt, and zebra.lt. A total of 3073 headlines were collected. After the analysis of collected headlines it can be stated that headlines in the news portals is an emerging autonomous text genre, typical of the short text genre. The peculiarities of headlines in news portals provide the evidence for that, and in particular for their functions. Headlines as texts perform a variety of functions: they report, inform, analyze, comment, express attitudes as well as emotions, try to convince, evaluate, and even appeal to something. This functional autonomy of headlines can be treated as the outcome of a shift in the structure of news portal headlines, i.e., the shift from one-word headlines and headlines taking the form of word combinations towards sentence-type headlines. The last-mentioned are dominant in present-day news portals, as the study revealed; while headlines of the other two types amount to only a small part of the total. Sentence-type headlines reflect not only the subjects of texts in the news portals, but also specific theses of those texts, the latter occurring more often. The majority of sentence-type headlines analyzed are original, i.e., made for the texts, and formulated as statements, but not only as factual but also as evaluative statements. Contentwise evaluative elements are one of the impact measures applied in the headlines. Questions in the headlines in the news portals play a significant role too. They are more rhetorical than requiring answers, which suggests that they are intended to draw the attention of news portal visitors. Another group of sentence-type headlines consist of headlines-quotes. Most of these headlines incorporate exact quotes. Exact quotes in the headlines as often as not reflect subjective attitudes of the authors of those quotes towards the topic of speech.

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