Page 89 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

78 • Sport, Media and Society

Newspaper Headlines

Richardson (2007: 64) proposed that journalism is best approached as ‘an argumen-

tative discourse genre’ dependent on various rhetorical figures of speech. Examples
of these include hyperbole (excessive exaggeration), metaphor (perceiving one thing
in terms of another), metonym (when something associated with a thing is substituted
for it), neologism (recently created words), puns and wordplay. Richardson (2007:
69) suggested that one of the most common neologisms in journalism is the use of
the suffi x -gate. The USA Today headline ‘Flap about Pats’ “Spygate” Cools Off’
(Weisman 2008: 4E) combined a neologism with alliteration and a familiar nickname
to reference the New England Patriots’ illegal taping of the Jets’ defensive signals
early in the 2007–2008 National Football League (NFL) season. Words used in these
ways carry associated ideological meanings. In this case, the reference to the Water-
gate political scandal, which ultimately led to the resignation of former president
Richard Nixon, contributes connotations of dishonesty, intrigue and corruption.
Much use is made of rhetorical devices by headline writers to draw the readers’
attention to a story. Reah (1998) observed that words selected for headlines often
enable writers to play on the ambiguities between words and meanings, using homo-
phones (words identical in sound but not spelling), polysemes (words with several
closely related meanings) or homonyms (words with more than one meaning which
are not obviously related). Headlines often use readers’ awareness of the sound of
the word to make meaning through alliteration or rhyme. Loaded words that generate
affective responses are used to make an impact and commonly appear in headlines.
Words may be omitted to deliver as much information as possible within a limited
space. The result of leaving out grammatical words is often to increase ambiguity
since many lexical words (nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs) rely on gram-
matical words (auxiliary verbs and determiners) to indicate what kind of word they
are (e.g. a noun or a verb). On 22 February 2008, the British press reported that the
left-wing Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, had invited the former athlete Linford
Christie (who is banned for life from competing in the Olympics as a result of a dop-
ing test) to carry the Olympic torch through London. The Guardian (Phillips 2008:
S9) used a long noun phrase (combinations of nouns with other words) to form the
headline ‘Christie Torch Role Sparks Uproar in Olympic Circles’. The wordplay on
torch and sparks, and the use of ‘circles’ to invoke the Olympic rings, is aided by
the removal of grammatical determiners so that sparks can be understood as either a
noun or a verb. Intertextual references to words and phrases from a range of cultural
sources extend the meaning of headlines. The graphological features of headlines
(font size and style) operate in conjunction with other visual aspects of the page, such
as layout and photographs, to construct the overall meaning. Font size may indicate
the importance of an event, which may be reinforced by the presence of a photograph.
The next section looks more closely at the linguistic devices used in newspapers to
frame sport stories, focusing on word choice and sentence construction.