This page presents an excerpt of the available research material, including the Preliminary Pages, Table of Contents, Abstract, Chapters One to Five, and References. It provides a comprehensive overview of the study, enhancing readability and accessibility for students, and researchers seeking complete material on “Ambiguities in Nigerian Newspaper Headlines”.
I am profoundly grateful to everyone who contributed to the successful completion of this project. I am especially grateful to my Supervisor (Name), the Head of Department (Name), and the Lecturers in the Department of English Language for their invaluable guidance and support. I also acknowledge the contributions of authors and scholars whose works on Ambiguities in Nigerian Newspaper Headlines : an Analysis of 5 Dailies provided essential insights. Special thanks go to my study area (and any funding organizations, if applicable) for their financial assistance. I am equally thankful to stakeholders, including mentors, teachers, and colleagues, for their encouragement and support. Finally, I deeply appreciate my family and friends for their patience and unwavering support throughout this journey. Your contributions have been instrumental in making this research a reality.
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.
1.1 Introduction
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. They are usually written on the top of newspaper articles with characteristic attributes like being punchy, concise, eye-catching and journalistic as they tend to recapitulate the essential aspects of the stories in the papers. In reporting the news, the editors have freedom to use words phrases and sentences in their own way to create headlines that express their idea of the news item. In language, ambiguity suggests the receptiveness of a construction to double or multiple interpretations, which can occur as a result of the presence of a word (lexical ambiguity), or by a phrase in the sentence (structural ambiguity).
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
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