INTERTEXTUALITY IN NEWSPAPER HEADLINES. CASE OF HEADLINES ON THE NAKATE PHOTO CROPPING INCIDENT

Juvénal Ntakarutimana, al

Abstract

The present study set out to investigate how discourse features contribute to building intertextual relations of news headlines reporting on the same news story. Using the theoretical model of Generic Structure Potential (Hasan, 1996), thirty-nine headlines of online news reporting on the story related to the cropped photo of the Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, were analysed. The results showed that intertextuality in the headlines is achieved through features that include reference to individuals, reference to country, reference to ethnicity, use of role label, reference to emotion, attention to language, use of evaluative language, reference to agency, reference to event, immediacy, quoting, and alluding. It was also revealed that, while some discourse features co-occurred, others were in a complementary distribution.