1 Functions of English News Headlines

In my opinion, English news headlines are very important especially in three ways: to attract readers’ attention, to disclose news contents and evaluate them.

It’s vital that headlines can attract readers attention. Large groups of readers won’t spend too much time glancing at a headline, which means the ‘fate’ of a headline is decided in a very short time. If a reader is attracted by a certain headline, he will continue to read the content below; if he is not interested, he might lose his thirst for reading the story, and then continue to hunt for other more exciting news. So if good news does not have an appropriate headline, it is quite woeful. Thus ‘first impression’ phenomenon is popular among news receivers. So there are many methods to make the headline eye-catching. Using oral words manages to attract readers, which can largely reduce the mental gap between the media and the readers and tell the core of the event more easily. Meanwhile, it is often a typical feature of sports news headline, since in political or economical news headlines oral phrases seem too colloquial and not serious and do not match the spirit of news content. Thus, sometimes they are much more popular. Words like ‘you’; ‘we’ are commonly used. However, too much use of this method will make the newspaper too vulgar and lack credibility among buyers.

To disclose news contents highlight news value. Readers have already formed the habit of reading headlines before news content, because a news headline can summarize the story. This indexing function suggests the important requirement of a good headline—that it state plainly what the story contains. With the development of the information age, it is a necessity for headlines to embody the news value within several words. Essences of the news content are generally time, place, people, reason, procedure, result, background and meaning, namely‘5W+1H’： when, where, who, what, why, and how. Headlines should state the most valuable essences of the news, so that they embody the importance, closeness, obviousness, originality and novelty of the story.

Evaluation news content means stating paper attitude. Headlines also disclose the essence of the story. It is the headlines’ job to convey to the readers the relative significance and seriousness of the news. This is normally done by expressing the editor or paper’s own expert opinion of a story’s value, usually by refinement of wording and choice of headline size and style. Thus, headlines lead readers into a certain understanding of the story, designed and expected from the paper. Finally, newspapers state their standpoint in its headlines.

2 Structural Characteristics

Compared with the body of the news, an English sports news headline has its distinct characteristics in its form, which is normally consisted of two aspects of punctuations and language units.

The most commonly used punctuations in the sports news headlines are commas, colons, dashes and quotation marks, with their function to divide the group meaning, substitute words, as well as stress the key information and make sense of reality prominent.

Seen from the linguistic units, the elements adopted to make an English sports news headline include words, phrases, and sentences. Seldom will the readers see a news headline only in one word, and phrases and sentences are the major elements for making English sports news headline. Phrases include noun phrase, prepositional phrases and appositives. Sentences include incomplete sentence, complete sentence and compound sentence. And incomplete sentence can be regarded as noun phrase; a complete sentence includes simple sentence and complex sentence, whereas a simple sentence can be further divided into statement, question and imperative. Simple sentence serves the same important function as noun phrase in English sports news headlines.

3 Lexical Characteristics

Nouns and midget words, vogue words abbreviations and numbers are the most important words used in English sports news headlines.

Generally Speaking, the headline space in the news papers and magazines is extremely precious and it is meant to hold maximum volume of information within the minimum space. While sometimes the information in a news headline should be communicated to the readers with the help of a complete sentence. In order to save space, the function words(sometimes the linking verb be is also included)in the sentences are dropped out, and what is left are mainly the notion words, especially nouns. Sometimes even some news headlines in the form of phrases also omit the function words within them and thus the phenomenon of juxtaposition of nouns comes into being. Seen from the noun itself, it is of strong function of opinions and is rich in information, and at the same time is of wide grammaticality. Adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, etc. can express the complete grammatical concept of a sentence with a very simple structure, which accordingly can relieve the limited space in the news headlines. Therefore, nouns take a dominant major place in English news headlines. And joint nouns become very common and popular in English sports new headlines. Such as: An African Adventure.

Being new is the soul of news, and it highly depends on the contents of the news reported: as news reports must follow very closely to the trends of the times and are closely bound up with daily life. Every new object, new phenomenon, new idea, and new fashion always makes appearance in the news media first and then is communicated to the masses. Therefore the words that refer to the newly appeared objects are so-called time-generated words, namely new words and new phrases created in certain times. Vogue words are the creation of the times, and they are also the crystallization of the changes in social, economical, cultural, and technological reforms and developments. It is still unknown whether these vogue words can stand as time passes by. But one thing is for sure: it makes the news more vivid and attractive.

Like midget words, the preference for abbreviations is also due to the limited space in news headlines. Mr. Guoqiang divided English abbreviations into two sorts, and one is called the lipped words, that is, to abbreviate part of letters in a word to form a new word, just like taking the underlined letters away from gymnasium, and we can get gym, and the other is called initializes or acronyms, namely, to combine the initials of words in the phrase and create a new word, like FIFA, which stands for Federation International Football Association. By using abbreviations, editors and journalists can reduce as many words as possible in the sports news headlines and save news headline space to avoid changing lines. The use of lipped words is only confined to proper names like place names, people’s names, names of organizations as well as titles, months, and days. Besides the use of clipped words, number also takes a very important part in sports headline news to give prominence to key information.

4 Grammatical Characteristics

Omission of words, present tense and non-finite verbs are the most important features when it refers to the headlines grammar.

Grammatically speaking, omission can be regarded as the major feature of a sports news headline. To some extent, there is omission in almost every news headline we come across. Omitting any word that has no solid notion can dramatically reduce the length of a sports news headline, thus making it concise and pithy in meaning and eye-catching in key information. The words can be dropped out in a sports news headline include articles, prepositions, linking verb be, conjunctions, etc. And sometimes, the notion words that share the same background information in different cultures can also be omitted. Such as: They Are Lions, Hear Them Roar =They Are Lions, and Hear Them Roar (omission of conjunction and).

A sports news headline should be concise in words and comprehensive in meaning. To achieve the effect that makes the verbs both vivid and fresh, a news headline seldom uses simple past tense, instead, present tense is preferred, and with that the directness and spontaneity in the report is achieved and freshness and reality is conveyed to the readers. Serving the same function as the so-called Historical Present Tense in literature writings, it is regarded as the Journalistic Present Tense. The three most commonly used tenses in English sports news headlines include the simple present tense, the present continuous tense and the present future tense.

The forms of non-finite verbs in English include infinitive, gerund and past participle. The various and rich expression forms enable the journalists to communicate the information to the readers with many choices.

5 Rhetoric Characteristics

In creating English sports news headlines, rhetoric devices are always the favorite tools. Editors use rhetoric devices to deliver information and other denotative and connotative meanings in the limited space of headlines. Meanwhile, readability can be greatly improved as well. Colorful and diversified rhetoric devices used in the news headlines have three main functions：to show simplicity, improve vividness and enrich rhythm.

The application of rhetoric devices to sports news headlines can really flourish newspapers and finally attract readers’ attention. But this does not mean that rhetoric devices can be randomly and discretionarily used in the headlines.

For a good news report and story, the content itself is the real lifeline. Only the quality of the content can touch the readers’heart. Even though a nice headline can temporarily attract some eyeballs, if the news itself does not have actual content and information of equal quality, the headline in the end is just no more than a flub dub. Hence, rhetoric devices should not be widely and freely used.