Analyzing of Speech Acts of Al Jazeera and Euronews Headlines Regarding the Russia-Ukraine War

Abstract

      Recently, there's been a rise in media attention. As a consequence, various patterns may be discovered from both an academic and an industry aspect. News networks, for instance, play a significant role in informing people all over the world about political conditions, military occurrences, and other topics. The language used during news stories, including headlines, has a significant impact on the communicative aim of such matters. This language is distinguished by a variety of linguistic characteristics. One of such characteristics is pragmatic. Sometimes this problem has received inadequate attention in studies. To be more specific, the use of speech acts as a central component of pragmatics hasn't been adequately addressed in scientific research in this field. As a result, the current study attempts to fill this gap by investigating the types of speech acts employed in the headlines of Al Jazeera and Euronews websites describing the Russia-Ukraine War. Forty-seven headlines have been selected from these news websites - 22 from Aljazeera English and 25 from Euronews. For this goal, the data analysis has utilized Bach and Harnish's (1979) the taxonomy of Speech Acts. This study purports that headlines can be loaded with the encoded pragmatic meanings which makes it worth conducting to reveal those kinds of meanings. The selected period is between 1 to 31 May 2022. In accordance with the data, directives and constatives happened more often than commissives. There is no use for other categories like verdictives, effectives, or acknowledgments. In line with the study, headline writers for the websites Al Jazeera and Euronews stress on the Russia-Ukraine War as preoccupying and impacting the whole world, and they utilize certain speech acts "directives and constatives" more commonly than others. In accordance to the results, making use of certain speech acts when producing headlines is an effective technique to encourage readers to swiftly comprehend what is being conveyed.