Ambiguities in Nigerian Newspaper Headlines

Ambiguity is an attention-grabbing linguistic trend which has received a lot of attention and will continue to receive such as long as human communication remains viable. In language, ambiguity simply means double or multiple interpretations. Headlines are often what the readers come across in newspapers. The Newspaper headlines in their ambiguous state could be misinterpreted by reader based on the construction of phrases or sentences. The research work analyzes the Ambiguities in Nigerian Newspaper Headlines. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out to identify the linguistic features that makes Nigerian Newspapers headlines ambiguous, analyze the semantic ambiguity in the headline structure of the print media and investigate the data collected from five dailies Nigerian newspapers and qualitatively analyzed them. Using data from Vanguard and Daily Trust newspapers, the study discovered that ambiguities are prevalent in the newspaper headlines as a result of various manipulations on sentences and lexical choice. This leads to the possibility of multiple meanings and interpretation of the headlines. The research is of great significance considering the level at which people misconstrue the facts and meanings of the concept of newspaper arising from the use of ambiguous words or language by the news editors and writers. It is recommended that Readers should be given top priority while linguistic decisions are being made. General language users should be made aware of the danger of modeling their styles after those commonly found on newspaper headlines.