Author:

Keywords:

Arts & Humanities, Literature, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, Literature, 2004 Linguistics, 2005 Literary Studies, 4704 Linguistics

Abstract:

This paper presents a corpus study into article omission in newspaper headlines. The corpus consists of material from a variety of Dutch and Flemish newspapers. Focus will be on genre-based variation in the frequency of article omission in headlines: in the news report register articles are omitted much more frequently than in headlines of longer articles presenting background or subjective information on a certain news issue. Apart from that, our analysis focuses on the semantic and syntactic distribution of the phenomenon (from a synchronic perspective). Two contexts will be identified that have an impact on the realization of articles in headlines: idioms and citations. These two conditions trigger the use of an overt article, in spite of the general tendency to omit overt articles in newspaper headlines. On the basis of such observations about the grammatical restrictions to article omission, a case will be made for its description as a manifestation of the more widespread tendency in Dutch to omit articles and not as a phenomenon motivated solely by pragmatic factors.