THE MANIFESTATION OF PRAGMATIC PRESUPPOSITION IN NEWSPAPER HEADLINES THROUGH STYLISTIC DEVICES (METAPHOR, METONYMY, IRONY, ETC.) WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF COMPARED LANGUAGES

Abstract

Newspaper headlines are the most concise text units of mass media from a linguistic perspective, possessing high communicative effectiveness, and they serve to convey important information to the reader in a brief, clear, and impactful manner. Headlines, as the "gateway" of media discourse, attract the reader to the content of the article and provide the first cognitive signal in the process of receiving information, with the pragmatic and informational functions of the headline playing a central role. Research shows that, along with their communicative function, headlines perform the function of attracting the reader's attention, highlighting the text from the context, and preparing them to perceive subsequent speech blocks (there is extensive multidimensional analysis on the pragmatic and linguocultural aspects of newspaper headlines). The linguistic means used in headlines rely on pragmatic presupposition, the reader's pre-existing knowledge, cultural cognitive structures, and contextual assumptions, which serve to enrich the content of the text and facilitate deeper understanding. Presupposition is a set of assumptions not directly stated in the text but accepted by the reader as existing in their mind, and it aligns with the principle of economy in language when creating headlines: ensuring maximal information and implicative meaning with minimal words. In this process, pragmatic mechanisms shape the reader's assumptions about the text, create a state of contextual expectation, and make the perception of the text more effective, since the headline serves as the first 'pragmatic signal' in linguistics for interpreting the text and reconstructing its communicative intent.