engleski

Comparing research and review paper titles from academic journals and article headlines from magazines: A sociolinguistic approach

Scientific community on the one hand, and journalism community on the other differ in many ways – among them in the style of writing. Consequently, the aim of our study was to analyse two subsets of captions, i.e. headlines of articles published in magazines and titles of research and review papers published in academic journals, both with regard to their types in terms of construction and with regard to usage of figurative language. To scrutinize these two from the viewpoint of sociolinguistics very different communities, a sample of 372 cases, i.e. headlines of articles published in magazines (n=106) and titles of research and review papers (n=266) was drawn. Upon allocating the captions into one of four construction groups, in compliance with the research by Soler (2007), i.e. nominal group construction titles, compound titles, full-sentence titles and question-construction titles, Pearson chi-square test has revealed that nominal phrase structure was by far a caption type more frequent in the titles of papers published in academic journals and that figurative language was significantly more frequent in the headlines of magazine articles. Special attention was also paid to the group of compound titles, i.e. their construction and style as two strategies that might help attract the attention of prospective readers. The analysis in this respect demonstrated that both the article compound-structure headlines and paper compound-structure titles were predominantly comprised of two nominal phrases. As for magazine articles' headlines, the second most frequent structure combined a nominal phrase and a full sentence. Our analysis has additionally testified to varying trends in titles of papers published in academic journals.

titles ; headlines ; scholarly journals ; magazines

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