A Contrastive Analysis of Sports Headlines in Two English Newspapers

Abstract

It holds true that a flourishing fieldof Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) research has begun to address theway various text types and/or genres may differ across culturesand languages (Corner, 1996). Very much in line withthis development, this study was an attempt to characterizethe linguistic structures of headlines in the sports section of 2 English newspapers: one non-Iranian (<em>The Times</em>) and one Iranian (<em>Tehran Times</em>). The content analysis was based on a 3-week corpus of the headlines. The variability of syntactic and lexical features of the sample headlines in both newspapers was analyzed contrastively. The results of the qualitative and quantitative analyses of syntactic and lexical features indicated that the sports headlines of both newspapers were similar in using type of verb (dynamic and stative), headline types (verbal and nominal), voice (passive and active), tense (simple past, present, progressive, and future), and functional types (statement, question, and command), but significantly different in their quantitative use of headline types by predications (simple, complex, and compound). Besides, quantitative differences were observed in the type of modifications (premodification/postmodification), type of nouns (proper, common, and acronym) and exclamation type of headlines. The pedagogical implications of the study have been offered.