What does a headline say? A constructional approach of Argentinean and Brazilian headlines

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2317-9651.v0i19p110-139

Keywords:

Construction grammar, Headlines, Argentinean Spanish, Brazilian portuguese, Semantic frame

Abstract

In this paper, within Usage-Based Construction Grammar framework (Goldberg 1995, 2006 among others) language constructions instantiated in newspaper headlines in Spanish and Portuguese were compared. 300 data from crime section from Argentinean and Brazilian newspapers were analyzed and the result of the analysis of 150 headlines from each language shows that: (a) in the Argentinean headlines corpus more constructions were instantiated (12 types) than in the Brazilian headlines corpus (5 types) and (b) the exact choice of a construction from Spanish array depends on the semantic predictability and the pragmatic relevance of participants of the event. The chosen construction helps preventing misguided readings. Brazilian Portuguese constructions in the corpus, in turn, were less diverse, and were less specified for meaning, expressing semantically predictable and pragmatically irrelevant participants.

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Author Biography

  • Paulo Pinheiro Correa, Universidade Federal Fluminense

    Professor de Língua Espanhola da Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) e do Programa de Pós Graduação em Estudos de Linguagem na mesma instituição. Mestre e Doutor em Lingüística pela UFRJ, com Pós-Doutorado em Filología na Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Espanha. Seus intereses de pesquisa incluem funções pragmáticas em espanhol e português, tradução e aquisição de segundas línguas. Artigos recentes: ‘Características das construções de foco sentencial no portugués, em um esttudo de corpus paralelo’, REVEL vol.13 (2015); ‘Hendidas y otras construcciones focalizadoras en español argentino y portugués brasileño: un estudio de producciones audiovisuales’, Signo y Seña 26 (2014); ‘A função pragmática Tópico na legendagem brasileira de um filme argentino em um estudo de corpus paralelo’, Letras & Letras vol. 30 (2014). Endereço eletrônico: papicorrea@gmail.com.

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Published

2020-06-24

Issue

No. 19 (2020): (jan- jun 2020) Dossiê: A língua espanhola: estudos descritivos, comparativos e sobre aquisição/aprendizagem

Section

Dossier

License

Copyright (c) 2020 Paulo Pinheiro-Correa

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How to Cite

CORREA, Paulo Pinheiro. What does a headline say? A constructional approach of Argentinean and Brazilian headlines. Caracol, São Paulo, Brasil, n. 19, p. 110–139, 2020. DOI: 10.11606/issn.2317-9651.v0i19p110-139. Disponível em: https://revistas.usp.br/caracol/article/view/161721.. Acesso em: 13 may. 2025.