A Study Of Syntactic And Lexical Features Of Economic Headlines On English And Vietnamese Newspapers

Abstract

As a type of media text, newspaper has an important role in human‟s life because it presents various local, national and international information and events. In order to attract readers‟ attention, journalists make the headlines as ambiguous and confusing as possible so that the readers are curious to know the content of the whole story and they would read it. It can be said that understanding the headlines of the news is a gateway to understand the whole news, so news headlines is an area worthwhile for us to go deep into. Moreover, in presenting the information or events, different reporters will have different linguistic choices which include the choice of words and expressions and different linguistic structures. Thus, this paper aims at analyzing the syntactic and lexical features of English and Vietnamese newspaper headlines. The corpus of the study consists of 400 headlines of news collected from famous online newspapers on worldwide webs such as www.bbc.com, www.theguardian.com, www.reuters.com, for the English headlines and www. vietnamnet.vn, www.vietbao.vn, www.vneconomy.com, for the Vietnamese ones. Considering the absence of contrasting English and Vietnamese newspaper headlines, the present study is an attempt to conduct a contrastive analysis between the newspaper headlines of English and Vietnamese languages in terms of lexical features and syntactic structures in order to find major similarities and differences between them. And at the end of the thesis suggested rules for reading online newspapers and pedagogical implications for teaching journalistic English are drawn out.