A Speech Acts Analysis of English COVID-19 News Headlines

Abstract

News headline is a key element in spreading news. It is a unique text written in a special language which enables readers understand the overall nature and importance of the topic. However, this special language causes difficulty for readers to understand the headline. To illuminate this difficulty, it is argued that a pragmatic analysis from a speech act theory perspective is a plausible tool for a headline analysis. The main objectives of the study were to pragmatically analyze the most frequently employed types of speech acts in the news headlines covering COVID-19 in Aljazeera English website. To this end, Bach and Harnish's (1979) Taxonomy of Speech Acts has been adopted to analyze the data. Thirty headlines have been collected from Aljazeera English news website. The findings have shown that constatives and directives occurred more frequently than commissives. Other types, like acknowledgments, effectives and verdictives were not employed. The study has concluded that to pay special emphasis on COVID-19 as an issue that preoccupied and endangered the world, headline writers of Aljazeera website used specific speech acts, constatives and directives, more frequently than others. This makes it clear that using specific speech acts in writing headlines is an effective way for inspiring readers to easily understand the intended message.