English in Journalism
207M037 G. P.
English varies according to situations where it is used, and journalistic English is one of its varieties that arise due to situational factors. This thesis dealt with English in Journalism. A large number of university students as learners of English as a foreign language seem to find journalistic English difficult to understand. It is certain that there are a number of features in journalistic English and these features are likely to make these students feel it is very hard to follow what news stories or their headlines communicate or, for this reason, keep the students away from trying to read them. The investigating of English in journalism is worthwhile in itself and at the same time it is worthwhile from the viewpoint of English language learning.
In Chapter I, I made an attempt to show in what respects journalistic texts are generally different from other texts. Since it is difficult to take into consideration every type of text to compare with journalistic texts, I made a comparison of the first four paragraphs of a news story with the opening paragraph of a novel in terms of how English is used and how the text is structured. Furthermore, a discussion was given about how university students respond to journalistic English. This is based on my survey conducted through a questionnaire answered by 300 university students from Japan, China and Indonesia.
In Chapters II and III our main focus were directed to the question as to how the headline as the most important part of the news story is working. The headline is generally expected by readers to be brief and clear at the same time. It has to come up to these two contradictory expectations. After taking them into consideration, I tried to investigate conventional features of the headline in Chapter II. There are a number of linguistic features that serve to make the headline short and clear. They include omission of the determiner, that of be as a verb and as an auxiliary verb, use of the simple present tense referring to past time and so forth.
Chapter III dealt with creative features of the headline, such as arranging the same or similar items in a phonological and syntactic structure or making use of homophones with which to make readers remember corresponding items that do not occur in the horizontal structure but are hidden in the vertical system. It was argued that these creative features of the headline make it look interesting and thereby capture readers’ attention. These features were considered to make the headline serve the purpose it is expected to serve.
In Chapter IV I made a comparison between headlines from two newspapers and those from two magazines in their syntactic structure. I collected 400 headlines for this comparison, 200 of which were taken from the New York Times and the Japan Times and the other 200 from Time and Newsweek. Then I classified all the headlines into the sentence structure class and the phrase structure class. The results obtained from this classification demonstrated that more than 80% of all the headlines collected from the two newspapers were formed in sentence structure while more than 60% of all the headlines from the two magazines were written in phrase structure. Furthermore, I considered possible reasons why this preference arises in terms of how much information each structure gives, whether readers can have a previous knowledge of the events reported and whether there are visual aids that support headlines.