Headline Hooks: Corpus Patterns of High Frequency Adjectives in Pakistani English Newspaper Front Pages

Abstract

Aim of the study: Linguistic features of newspaper headlines are carefully used to capture reader’s attention in reporting various news including politics, terrorism, economy, climate change, foreign relations, human rights, terrorism, sports, and technological advancements. This study aims to explore the linguistic features, specifically the use of adjectives in the front-page headlines of a leading Pakistani newspaper, The Dawn, in the year 2024, for reporting domestic and international events that were central to public discourse during this period.

Methodology: This study employs corpus techniques to explore the adjectives use in media discourse. The corpus was developed by collecting all the front-page headlines of the year 2024 from The Dawn newspaper. The data was generated from front-page headlines published over 366 days during the year 2024, totaling a corpus of 2,040 headlines. The data was analyzed through the Sketch Engine software for frequency analysis to uncover high-frequency adjectives used in front-page headlines to engage readers.

Findings: Findings shows that different categories of adjectives were identified with high frequency of evaluative and descriptive adjectives suggesting an editorial strategy aiming at creating engaging and emotionally resonant headlines. The descriptive adjective is the most frequent type of adjective in the headlines, with 86% (e.g, new, reserved, chief, first, top), indicating that people prefer to read exaggerated and descriptive content in Pakistan. Most of these adjectives were found in relation to politics, law, and foreign affairs. A few were related to the military and economics. Moreover, very few adjectives were related to technology and the economy.

Conclusion: The study indicate that Pakistani newspapers’ front-page headlines are dominated by political news with high frequency of descriptive adjectives as a means to creating emotional appeal to the readers.