A contrastive analysis of English and Persian newspaper headlines

As a main component in newspaper discourses, news headlines have increasingly attracted the interests of linguists. However, lexical and syntactic studies of news headlines have been comparatively little studied. Considering the absence of contrasting English and Persian newspaper headlines, the present study was an attempt to conduct a contrastive analysis between the headlines of the two languages in order to find the main similarities and differences between them. The analysis was based on a one-week corpus of the headlines of the two languages and looked into the following aspects: 1. What features can be identified as typical for both English and Persian newspaper headlines? 2. What are the differences between Persian and English headlines? 3. What are the students' problems in translating the headlines? Utilizing CA, the degree of variability of syntactic and lexical features was analyzed across and within the two languages.