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Article published In:
Register Variation and Syntactic Theory
Edited by Diane Massam and Tim Stowell
[Linguistic Variation 17:2] 2017
► pp. 205–228

Register variation and distributional patterns in article omission in Dutch headlines

| KU Leuven
| Artevelde University College

This paper presents a corpus study of article omission in newspaper headlines. The corpus consists of material from a variety of Dutch and Flemish newspapers. The most important factor influencing the frequency of article omission in headlines is the journalistic genre in which it occurs. The main focus of the study is on the semantic and syntactic distribution of the phenomenon, on the basis of which a case will be made for its description as a manifestation of the more widespread decline of the article in Dutch and not as a phenomenon motivated solely by pragmatic factors.

Keywords: semantics, corpus research, register variation, synchronic variation, Dutch
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Problems and basic assumptions of corpus research into headlines
    • 2.1Earlier corpus studies
    • 2.2Hypotheses
  • 3.Overview of the corpus and methods
    • 3.1Journalistic genres
    • 3.2Corpus overview
    • 3.3Analysis of different types of omissions
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1General results
    • 4.2The influence of the headline’s genre
    • 4.3The use of overt articles in headlines
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Overt articles as ‘Last Resort’
    • 5.2Idiomatic contexts
      • 5.2.1Expletive articles in idiomatic contexts
      • 5.2.2Generic reference in headlines
    • 5.3Citations
    • 5.4Creative headlines
    • 5.5The effect of syntactic position
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 26 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.15002.oos
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