THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HEADLINES AND LEADS OF ENGLISH ONLINE NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

Being two essential and most important parts of an article in English, headline and lead are closely related not only from journalistic but also linguistic view points. If it is the role of the healine to introduce the article’s topic, the lead’s function is to maintain and develop the topic
raised by the healine through lexical and syntactical devices. This kind of topic maintaining and developing cohesion is established in order to enhance the leads’ ability to give supporting details to headlines to fulfll their duties: providing information and attracting readers. This study investigates 150 articles randomly selected from 3 typical English online newspapers: ‘BBC’, ‘The Guardian’ and ‘The Reuters’ in order to discover general and particular characteristics of these newspapers’ style. Despite the difference between the level of topic development of the certain newspaper and article, series of lexical and syntactical devices used for topic maintaining and developing cohesion may co-exist in a lead in order to create the close and inseparable connection between these two parts of an article.