A Research on Cognitive Metonymy Models of News Headlines from ft.com

Abstract

News as a literary form adopted by public media, has been playing an important role in reporting international events. Due to the fast pace of life in today’s society, readers usually grasp the major events by just reading the headlines. While the headline as the “eye” of a piece of news, enables the readers to catch the key and hot point at the first time by means of its terse and concise words. With the rise of cognitive linguistics, metonymy is regarded not only as a rhetorical device, but also as a way of thinking the objective world. What’s more, metonymy also plays an important role in the news headline discourse organization. Therefore, based on the cognitive metonymy theory, this research makes the case studies of the news headlines which contain metonymy in order to answer the two questions: (1) Among the different kinds of cognitive metonymy models, which one is used the most frequently in news headlines? (2) Are the natures and values of news headlines related to the choice of these cognitive metonymy models?