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Vol. 8 No. 2 (2019)

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Submitted
Nov 6, 2020
Published
Jan 3, 2020

Analysis of Newspaper Headlines: A Case of Two Tanzanian English Dailies

https://doi.org/10.56279/jhss.v8i2.17
erasmus akiley msuya

Journal of Humanities & Social Science (JHSS), Vol. 8 No. 2 (2019)

Abstract

The current study analyses newspaper headlines in respect to three categories:
international, local, and business news (irrespective of the geographical scope) of two
English dailies: a government-owned Daily News, and a privately-owned The Guardian. The
study sought to analyse newspaper headlines guided by semantic under-determinacy, an
important theoretical framework in accounting for a balance between linguistic economy
that characterises newspaper headlines and communicative precision. The data were
collected via documentary review. The headlines were analysed under three categories:
local, international, and business news that included local and international spectrums. A
total of 2004 headlines were randomly selected for analysis: 1088 from The Guardian, and
916 from the Daily News. The headlines were classified into five semantic underdeterminacy categories as developed by Carston (2002), which are: multiple encodings,
missing constituents, unspecified scope of elements, over-specificity, and underspecificity. Frequencies of occurrence of headlines were computed in each category. The
findings showed that local news predominated over international and business news
headlines both in frequencies of occurrence and in the categories of missing
constituencies and multiple encodings in both newspapers. The study concludes that
there is no specific in-house news headlines’ framing between the two newspapers.

Keywords

headlines newspaper semantic under-determinacy Tanzania
akiley msuya, erasmus. (2020). Analysis of Newspaper Headlines: A Case of Two Tanzanian English Dailies. Journal of Humanities &Amp; Social Science (JHSS), 8(2). https://doi.org/10.56279/jhss.v8i2.17
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