An Analysis of Semantic Prosody in News Headlines

Abstract

This research article aims to investigate the phenomenon of semantic prosody in news headlines. Semantic prosody refers to the consistent positive or negative associations of a word or phrase in a given context. In the context of news headlines, semantic prosody plays an important role in shaping readers’ perceptions and attitudes towards news topics. The study analyzes a corpus of news headlines from different online news sources, including CNN, BBC, Reuters, and The New York Times. The mixed-method approach is utilized to explore the frequency and patterns of semantic prosody in news headlines. In the milieu of findings, the proposed study sheds light on the linguistic strategies employed by news writers to influence readers’ attitudes and opinions. To justify the impact of semantic prosody on reader’s perception and engagement with news headlines, references entailed in this research are drawn from recent studies and research published between 2021 and 2023 that includes works by scholars such as Xie et al. (2021), Wang and Huang (2022), and Zhang and Wang (2023), among others