Analyzing Present Simple in Newspaper Headlines

Abstract

This paper discusses the usage of tenses in the names of the Telegraph and The New York Times in English newspapers. The researchers randomly selected 100 headlines from both journals and statistically analyzed them, as the main objective of this study is to observe which tenses are more frequent than others. The researcher has come up with some findings after reviewing the corpus of these two papers, that the present simple tense, whether traditional or historical, is the most frequently used tense as it gives the journalists the ability to make the story fresher and more vivid and thus attract the interest of readers, followed successively by the past tense and the future tense. The paper also argued that rather than the traditional present tense, the historical present tense that has been used to refer to past events with a modern perspective is used. In terms of sentence structure, passivation, the use of articles and conjunctions, the researcher recommends that media discourse requires further investigation. Also recommended is a functional research report about how meanings are filled with media lexis.