Exploring Syntactic Ambiguity Enablers in News Headlines
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2025.17.4Keywords:
enablers, syntactic ambiguity, news headlines, X-bar syntax, tree diagramsAbstract
The language of news headlines incorporates a number of linguistic devices with the aim of effectively getting the message across and attracting the reader’s attention. Together with contracted syntax, which is typical of headline language, some of these devices often lead to more than one interpretation. This research sets out to analyze syntactic ambiguity enablers (Oaks 1994), or, in other words, linguistic phenomena leading to ambiguity in headlines, which is resolved by way of providing tree diagrams for each interpretation. The diagrams follow the rules posited in the X-bar theory of syntax, which introduces the hierarchical phrase structure, allowing for disambiguation in cases where linear structures would fall short of. The dataset analyzed consists of 38 headlines found on various websites. The results suggest that ambiguity in headline language is not incidental but rooted in structural patterns which are classified into five categories. The results also show that 57.9% of the headlines comprising the dataset fall into the category involving the ambiguity which stems from the capacity of some word forms to serve as different word classes.
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