Ambiguities in Newspaper Headlines: A Case Study of Daily Trust and Vanguard Newspapers
Chapter One
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
The objectives of this research are:
- To analyze semantic ambiguity in the headline structure of the print media.
- To find several possible meanings of the ambiguous
- To find out if reasons exist on why the newspaper chooses to be ambiguous in their headlines.
CHAPTER TWO
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
INTRODUCTION
People’s utterance can be viewed from various perspectives. The same sentence uttered by somebody can have different meanings. The meaning of an utterance, at times can go beyond the surface meaning of the sentence. Consider the simple sentence ‘it is five o’clock’ uttered by a parent to his/her friend might mean that ‘I am worried that my son is not back yet’, even though ‘worried’ is not mentioned. It can also mean ‘Time is up’ when uttered by a teacher conducting a test for his students. Comprehensibility goes beyond knowing how to put words together in sequence to make grammatically well formed sentence. And it also involves an understanding of meaning that different from knowing the meaning of words (lexical meaning) and the meaning of syntactic features (grammatical meaning).
LANGUAGE ANDCOMMUNICATION
Sapir (1977) defines language as “a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntary produced symbols”. Block and Trager (1986:23) define language as “ a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates”, Also, Hall (1978) sees language as “the institution where human beings communicate and interact with each other” while Gimbson (1984) sees language as “ a system of conventional signals used for communication by a whole community”.
Language is a universal phenomenon which aims at promoting social and peaceful co-operation and existence amongst the numerous people of the different speech communities that constitute the world. Language has thus, become an enormously powerful tool, especially in its universal range of application, because language has become and will continue to be the most subtle and powerful device man has and will ever have for controlling his environment including other people. However, language is not used to communicate meaning only but to mask it and such is the motive behind the analysis of this research in its focus on ambiguity.
Communication is seen by Crystal (1977) as the transmission and reception of linguistic contents, source and receiver are interpreted in human terms, the system involved is language, and the notion of response to (or acknowledgement of) the message becomes of crucial importance. On the other hand, Dominick (1990) defines mass communication as the process by which a complex organization with the aid of one or more machine produces and transmits public messages that are directed at large, heterogeneous and scattered audiences. From the above definition, mass communication is a process of transmitting message through a mass media like newspaper, magazine, books, radio and television to large population over long distance. Mass communication often involves simultaneous contact between one sender and many receivers, allowing an immediate and extensive influence and an immediate response by many at a time (Mc Quail, 1987:32).
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
The chapter deals with the methodology employed in the conduct of the study. It describes the research design, study population, sample and sampling technique method of data collection.
METHODOLOGY
The research uses descriptive research which aims at identifying ambiguities found in the news of the Vanguard and Daily Trust newspapers. Descriptive research is a research method that describes the subject or the object of the research based on the fact or reality. Isacc and Michael (1987:46) stated that, “descriptive method has a purpose to describe systematically a situation or area of interest factually and accurately”. This study was conducted by formulating the problems, collecting the data and analysing the data.
The unit of analysis of this study is every phrases, clauses and sentences found in the news headlines in Vanguard and Daily Trust newspapers that may consist of ambiguities. The researcher analysed the data through some steps. First, finding the data which has possibility of ambiguity from the newspapers and internet. Second, reading and comprehending the selected data. Third, identifying every phrases, clauses and sentences which are seemingly ambiguous. Forth, classifying the types of ambiguities based on Ullmann (1977:156) theories. Fifth, the researcher identifies the possible meaning of those ambiguous sentences, phrases, or even clauses. And the last in interpreting the data.
SAMPLE AND SAMPLING TECHNIQUES
This research identifies thirty (30) ambiguities in both the Vanguard and Daily Trust newspaper headlines. The population for this study is composed of newspapers published in Nigeria within the range of May- August 2013.
SOURCES OF DATA
Data for this research were obtained online from (www.vanguardngr.com/…/headlines and www.lastestnigeriannews.com), for the two Nigerian newspapers under study, namely: the Daily Trust and Vanguard.
CHAPTER FOUR
DATA ANALYSIS
INTRODUCTION
The focus of this research is to examine some expressions which are possibly ambiguous in the headlines of contemporary Nigerian newspaper. Newspaper headlines are written is a special kind of language with its own vocabulary and grammar. Headlines have a special grammar which differs from that of ordinary sentence.
The headline is the most interesting part of the newspaper, because newspaper headlines are considered to have their own characteristics and status in news discourse (Bell,1991). Fairclough (1995:21) states that “headlines have distinctive syntactic properties, which make them a grammatical oddity”. The headline is a unique type of text. It has range of functions that specifically dictate its shape, content and structure, and it operates within a range of restrictions that limit the freedom of the writer (Reah 1998).
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND CONCLUSION
This research shows that ambiguity is an important topic worthy of consideration and exploration. It is a phenomenon that learners of English may very possibly encounter. As argued by many authors, ambiguity can be found everywhere in language and is usually difficult to understand. Clare (1993) suggests that “ambiguity is an obstacle to be ignored or a problem to be solved for people to understand each other”. Kelvin (1998) believes that there is a direct relationship between vision and cognition with respect to newspaper headlines.
Semantically ambiguous media headlines have been looked at from the two levels in which ambiguity is broken down. The approach which was employed in this analysis is called the lexico-grammar which is concerned with the syntactic organisation of words into utterances, using the systemic functional grammar or linguistic theory. Through this method we could distinguish factors between lexical and structural ambiguous headlines of print media. There are quite a number of ambiguities ranging from syntactic through semantic and on to phonological and other types which are touched upon throughout this research work.
When analyzing ambiguity of sentences, it can be observed that ambiguity is not just limited to the meaning of sentences alone as in the case of semantic ambiguity but also on the order of word which is thus defined or called the syntactic ambiguity. Syntactic ambiguity comes about as a result of syntax which has to do with the patterns by which morphemes and grammatical categories such as noun, adjective, verbs, preposition and conjunction that are organized into sentences. To fully understand the syntax of a language one needs to have access to grammatical judgments. The distortion based on syntax of the media headline is that which journalists of print media employ mostly so as to mask the denotative meaning of headlines, thereby making it structurally ambiguous. It is thus worthy of note that the print media have not limited their headline to a particular type ambiguity but are seen to have encompassed the two types of ambiguity as a medium of disseminating information. Ambiguity as a linguistic term is said to be synonymous to polysemy at word level and has a relationship with vagueness, non-specificity and that the term ambiguity cannot be fully elaborated without making mention to syntax.
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