Analyzing the Use of Tenses in English News Headlines

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of tenses in English newspapers headlines of the Telegraph and The New York Times. As the main objective of this study is to observe which tenses are more frequent than others, the researcher randomly selected 100 headlines from both journals and statistically analyzed them using the statistical program SPSS. After analyzing the corpus of these two journals, the researcher has come up with some results that the present simple tense, whether conventional or historic, is the most frequently used tense as it gives the Journalists an opportunity to make the story more fresh and more vivid and hence attract readers attention, followed by the past tense and the future tense successively. The paper also concluded that the historic present tense which was used to refer to past events in a fresh perspective is used more than the conventional present tense. The researcher recommends that media discourse needs more investigations in terms of sentence structure, passivization, the use of articles and conjunctions. A functional analysis research on how media lexis is loaded with meanings is also recommended.