Presented at: the 2nd Kashmir International Conference on Linguistics 2015, AJK University
By: Muhammad Shakir (Associate Lecturer, University of Gujrat) & Dr. Muhammad Asim Mahmood (Associate Professor, Govt. College University Faisalabad)
Summary: Newspaper headlines are a distinct sub-genre of newspaper language. They perform a number of functions, the most important of which is to provide an overview of the news story. A number of newspapers in Urdu as well as English are published in Pakistan. Four national level newspapers of each language are selected in this research study. These newspapers differ in the conventions of headline setting, at the same time they also adopt features from each other. The first page of Urdu newspapers shows maximum number of headlines, while English newspapers have more modular nature. Space saving techniques at graphological and lexical level are present in both languages. Considerable differences are observed at grammatical level. Urdu newspaper headlines are more detailed; tend to use complete sentences and complex sentence types. English newspaper headlines are less lengthy, tend to use simple sentences and non-finite clauses, and are less likely to use complex sentence types. On the whole, Urdu newspapers tend to provide maximum information in headlines while English newspapers are less likely to do so.
