Linguistic Features of Front-Page Headlines in Albanian Print Media

Abstract

Previous research has explored different aspects of Albanian print media. This article focuses on headline discourse and presents preliminary findings based on an analysis of Albanian print media. Headlines are the most striking features of the newspapers and play crucial roles in summarizing the contents of newspaper articles. The structure of the headline, the use of punctuation and the vocabulary are very important elements to grab the reader’s attention so that they read not just the headline but the entire article. Some of these features are common to different languages and some linguistic characteristics are distinctive in different languages. Therefore, the aim of this study is to determine the linguistic patterns of front page headlines in Albanian language print media through a comparative approach to those patterns in English language headlines. This paper presents results regarding the peculiarities of linguistic features used in Albanian language newspapers. Headlines The linguistic features we discovered in newspaper headlines in Albanian are similar to those Swan (2005) lists for English. The results of this study indicate that nominal structures, present tense verbs, voice (active and passive), use of non-finite forms (infinitives, gerund and negative) use of the 5 wh-question words are linguistic features characteristic of front page headlines in Albanian newspapers.