Linguistic Features and Newsworthiness: An Analysis of News style
Authors: Maria Pia di Buono, Jan Snajder (University of Zagreb, 2017)
Topic: Textual Genres & Literature Linguistics

Abstract
In this paper, we present a preliminary study on the style of headlines in order to evaluate the correlation between linguistic features and newsworthiness. Our hypothesis is that each particular linguistic form or stylistic variation can be motivated by the purpose of encoding a certain newsworthiness value. To discover the correlations between newsworthiness and linguistic features, we perform an analysis on the basis of characteristics considered indicative of a shared communicative function and of discriminating factors for headlines.

Introduction
Newsworthiness refers to a set of criteria by means of which quantity and type of events are selected in order to produce news AUTHOR. That is to say, `news is not simply that which happens, but that which can be regarded and presented as newsworthy' AUTHOR. Galtung and Ruge AUTHOR identify a list of factors that an event should satisfy to become news; in other words, the likelihood of an event being considered newsworthy increases with the number of factors it complies with. The newsworthiness factors reflect a set of values and provide a certain representation of the world AUTHOR. This representation and the corresponding values are constructed and encoded in the language used in the news. For this reason, each particular linguistic form or stylistic variation can be motivated by the purpose of representing a certain value. According to Labov's axiom AUTHOR, style ranges along a single dimension, namely the attention paid to speech. Bell AUTHOR refutes this axiom, stating that style can be considered also as a response to other factors. These factors constitute a new dimension of stylistic variation, that, in headlines, might be related to the necessity of reflecting newsworthy factors, and meeting two needs: attracting users’ attention and summarizing contents AUTHOR. This paper aims to provide a preliminary analysis of the linguistic features in news headlines and how these relate to specific newsworthiness categories. The analysis rests on the hypothesis that each particular linguistic form or stylistic variation can be motivated by the purpose of encoding a certain newsworthy value. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we describe the related work on stylistic analysis of news and headlines. In Section 3, we describe the data set and the classification scheme we use. In Section 4 we introduce our methodology together with the analysis we perform, while in Section 5 we discuss the results. Section 6 concludes the paper.

Conclusion
We described a preliminary study for on style of headlines in order to evaluate the correlation among syntactic features and newsworthiness. Our hypothesis is that each particular linguistic form or stylistic variation can be motivated by the purpose of encoding a certain newsworthy value. We performed a linguistic analysis to discover the correlations among newsworthiness and some stylistic features, on the basis of characteristics considered indicative of a shared communicative function and discriminating factors for headlines. This preliminary analysis opens up a number of interesting research directions. One is the study of other stylistic variations of headlines, besides the ones examined in this paper. Another research direction is the comparison between style in headlines and full-text stories. It would also be interesting to analyze how communicative functions in headlines correlate with the events described in the pertaining text. We intend to pursue some of this work in the near future.