Newspaper headlines and relevance: Ad hoc concepts in ad hoc contexts

This paper addresses the issue of newspaper-headline interpretation by questioning standard assumptions on how headlines are designed on the basis of largely prescriptive pragmatic guidelines or norms. The main questions examined are firstly, whether ‘appropriate headlines’ from the writer's perspective converge with ‘effective headlines’ from the reader's perspective, and secondly, whether there is a pragmatic heuristic which can explain in psychologically plausible terms the way headlines are selected and interpreted by newspaper readers. Drawing on 137 readers’ reaction to a selection of UK/US newspaper headlines and on a corpus of 1310 reader-selected headlines, it is shown that headline readers tend to disregard standard norms such as length, clarity, and information as long as headlines rivet their attention in terms of creative style regardless of underdetermined semantic meaning. Using the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95; Wilson and Sperber, 2004; Wilson and Carston, 2007; Sperber and Wilson, 2008), it is suggested that readers select headlines guided by expectations of relevance and interpret headlines by creating occasion-specific ad hoc concepts and ad hoc contexts in an overall attempt to optimally ration processing effort with cognitive effects.