A Contrastive Analysis of Sports Headlines in Two English Newspapers

It holds true that a flourishing field of contrastive rhetoric (cr) research hasbegun to address the way various text types and/or genres may differ acrosscultures and languages (corner, 1996). very much in line with thisdevelopment, this study was an attempt to characterize the linguisticstructures of headlines in the sports section of 2 english newspapers: onenon-iranian (the times) and one iranian (tehran times). the contentanalysis was based on a 3-week corpus of the headlines. the variability ofsyntactic and lexical features of the sample headlines in both newspapers wasanalyzed contrastively. the results of the qualitative and quantitativeanalyses of syntactic and lexical features indicated that the sports headlines ofboth newspapers were similar in using type of verb (dynamic and stative),headline types (verbal and nominal), voice (passive and active), tense (simplepast, present, progressive, and future), and functional types (statement,question, and command), but significantly different in their quantitative useof headline types by predications (simple, complex, and compound). besides,quantitative differences were observed in the type of modifications(premodification/postmodification), type of nouns (proper, common, andacronym) and exclamation type of headlines. the pedagogical implications ofthe study have been offered.