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Abstract

The current study analyses newspaper headlines in respect to three categories: international, local, and business news (irrespective of the geographical scope) of two English dailies: a government-owned Daily News, and a privately-owned The Guardian. The study sought to analyse newspaper headlines guided by semantic under-determinacy, an important theoretical framework in accounting for a balance between linguistic economy that characterises newspaper headlines and communicative precision. The data were collected via documentary review. The headlines were analysed under three categories: local, international, and business news that included local and international spectrums. A total of 2004 headlines were randomly selected for analysis: 1088 from The Guardian, and 916 from the Daily News. The headlines were classified into five semantic under determinacy categories as developed by Carston (2002), which are: multiple encodings, missing constituents, unspecified scope of elements, over-specificity, and under specificity. Frequencies of occurrence of headlines were computed in each category. The findings showed that local news predominated over international and business news headlines both in frequencies of occurrence and in the categories of missing constituencies and multiple encodings in both newspapers. The study concludes that there is no specific in-house news headlines’ framing between the two newspapers.

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