A Pragmatic Analysis of Presupposition Triggers in Coronavirus News Headlines (Published)
Since news headlines are design to grab the reader’s attention, specific language variants are used to meet the two objectives of the news headlines writing process: conciseness and informativeness. While the second criteria necessitate a reversion to pragmatics, the first can be satisfied with a few grammatical variations. Presupposition a pragmatic construct that is used to the news producers’ advantage since it enables readers and listeners to easily grasp headlines and assess their value. To understand how presupposition affects news interpretations, this study looks into and evaluates the presupposition triggers found in news headlines. To that goal, coronavirus-related news articles are chosen for analysis. Sixty-six headlines are picked, including 29 from Fox News and 37 from BBC News. The findings show that lexical presupposition triggers show significant occurrences in both Fox news and BBC news. Due to the nature of the stories covered, iterative verbs are used often.
Keywords: lexical triggers, news headlines, presupposition