SPEECH NEGLIGENCE OR A COMMUNICATIVE TECHNIQUE? (SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF INTERNET NEWS HEADLINES)

The paper considers nowadays headlines, especially “abnormal” ones, taken from news sites. Structurally, the headline sentences under consideration include verbal nouns and participles, i.e. verbal derivatives, functioning as dependent predicates. The articlesubstantiates the idea that such sentences require observance of the rules of semantic andgrammatical interaction of the main and dependent predicates along the lines of modality, tense and subject. If they don`t, that results in distortion of the objective picture ofevents. Thus, potential events named by verbal nouns incorrectly combined with speechverbs, are definitely understood as real, so that supposed and future events are transferred to the real past. The paper also regards headlines with fi nal locative noun phrases ambiguously interpreted due to the concurrency between the verb and verbal noun. Basedon the category of taxis and type of reference of nouns, analysis of participles discovers the narrated real states of aff airs disordered or the reality and its fragments subjectively (pejoratively) characterized. The paper pays special attention to the process participles within headlines being converted into adjectives. The authors prove the idea that the essence of the nowadays Internet media headline strategy is that the headlines attract the readers by a very delicate balancing between correctness and incorrectness, which suggests the intentionality of the technique.