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Pragmatic and Semantic Potential of Newspaper Headlines
Hind M. Ismail
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2016.11.001
Anbar University, Anbar, Iraq
This paper aims at throwing a light on the interrelationship of pragmatics and semantics in terms of avoiding misunderstanding and miscommunication between the speaker/writer and hearer/reader. For this purpose, we restrict the sphere with the analysis of headlines from BBC news whose meanings are interpreted by using presuppositional and entailment techniques. Although semantics is concerned only with the literal meaning of the words and their interrelations, pragmatic usage pays attention to the importance of the so called inferred meaning that the speakers and listeners perceive. Presupposition and entailment refer to two different aspects of information. In presupposition, it is the speakers’ circumstantial knowledge while in entailments, it is a conclusion that speakers arrive as a definite type of consequence. Headlines subjectively give clues about or express the most important aspect of the text combining in themselves both semantic and pragmatic meanings and for our analysis of discourse, we will refer to media as a specific form of discourse that is itself a power resource and how media can influence people’s minds, e.g., their knowledge or opinions, revealing integration of among which is the major concerns of the paper. The study, with this in mind, explores the potential of semantics and pragmatic modules introduced by T. Van Dijk.
semantics, pragmatics, presupposition,entailment, context, headline
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