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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 36:1 (2026) ► pp.63–88

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Quotation headlines in the printed British quality press

(Re-)contextualisation meets entextualisation

ORCiD logo with link | University of Augsburg
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Augsburg.

Published online: 12 December 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.24024.fet
Abstract
News discourse comes along with the presumption of newsworthiness, and this also holds for one of its constitutive parts: headlines. This paper adopts a discourse-pragmatic perspective to the formatting and discursive function of quotation headlines in the printed British quality press. It addresses (1) the constitutive parts and felicity conditions of quotation; (2) its linguistic formatting as direct, indirect, scare, mixed and mixed type, and its signalling with metadata, and (3) its uptake and (re)contextualisation in the news story. In the data, quotation headlines are signalled linguistically with quotatives and typographically with single quotation marks, colons or empty spaces. Their uptake in the news story is signalled with double typographic quotation marks and supplemented with metadata (participants, local, temporal and discursive coordinates). As for their discursive functions, quotations not only import context into the news discourse, but their mention also implies that some prior, taken-for-granted contextualisation requires re-negotiation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Quotations in context
  • 3.News headlines in context
  • 4.The strategic use of quotations in printed newspaper headlines
    • 4.1Method and data
    • 4.2Results and distribution
    • 4.3Format and linguistic signalling
    • 4.4Discursive function
    • 4.5Uptake
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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