Headlines With Figures in the Media: A Structural and Functional Analysis

Headlines with figures in online media are analyzed, namely, in publications that are automatically submitted to the news tops of search browsers by content aggregators (Yandex, Mail.ru) (the portals Life, Free Press, the business newspaper Vzglyad, RBC, as well as resources of independent magazines for women Elle, Cosmopolitan, the resource Yandex Zen), the total size is approx. 1 000 headlines from 100 sites. The assumption is verified that the frequency use of this technique in online media has led to the emergence of a number of patterns, both at the level of the headline form (syntactic structures, specific vocabulary) and at the level of content, including pragmatic characteristics (such as conception and the factor of influence on the reader); i.e., one can speak about at least an initial recurring stereotyping. These headlines are analyzed in structural (lexical, morphological and syntactic form of the headline), thematic (it is shown that the most common topic is psychology, where the frequency of interpersonal relations leads by frequency, and the theme of human characters and classifications of human types based on any psychological, characterological, social, physiological, astrological (signs of the zodiac), etc. features), semantic-pragmatic (including the most important pragmatic components: addressee and addresser, illocutionary purpose; hence the types: advice, informing; impact: emotional, aesthetic; entertainment: humor, anecdotes, entertaining stories, biographies, fan fiction, photos, etc.) and connotative (sensational) aspects. It is shown that the form of headlines with a complex structure is most often found: n (Z) (Y-s) X-s, which ... (the presence or absence of the adjective Y and (especially) intensifier Z in this form is not important). Three main types of structure are distinguished from the point of view of the place of the main carrier of relevant information: a non-predicative phrase with informatively complete countable nouns without adjectives and informatively incomplete with adjectives; a complex sentence, in which not only the phrase with the number, but also the carrier of relevant information is in the main part; a complex sentence, in which the carrier of relevant information is in the subordinate part. In order to identify trends more specifically, the author uses the absolute and relative (percentage) quantitative analysis. The material was examined by a number of parameters: firstly, all lexemes acting in the functions X, Y and n in the analyzed 1 000 headlines were analyzed in frequency; secondly, structural and illocutionary types of headlines were analyzed; thirdly, the degree of gravitation of specific numbers in the headline to headline types and types of language structures was calculated.

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