THE 2014 GAZA CONFLICT IN THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS HEADLINES

Abstract

Language plays an important role in conveying the writers’/speakers’ ideal to readers/audiences in terms of structures and potential expression usage at different linguistic functions. The article is a survey research of 50 news headlines analyzed in terms of linguistic characteristics, structures and stylistic devices that journalists/editors used in The New York Times news headlines to cover the 2014 Gaza conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. The finding shows that the journalists tended to choose some linguistic characteristics, such as, capitalizing of the first letter of each lexical or content words, shortening of articles and auxiliary verbs. Most of verbal headlines with a finite clause are used in the news headlines. Some stylistic devices as metaphor, metonymy, rhetorical questions and parallelism are also effectively used by journalists to construct the news headline coverage of the 2014 Gaza conflict. These journalists’ choices also help The NYT to update the latest news headlines on online newspaper versions and to run their news headlines on social media platforms like facebook or twitter. The article makes contributions to practical teaching and research of news headlines with various topics in terms of linguistic characteristic, structure and stylistic device usage. This article is hoped to help learners to use these linguistic characteristics, structures and stylistic devices effectively into writing compositions and translating of news headlines at school and to read and to fully understand English news headlines outside as well.