How does fear hit the headlines?

Abstract

This article will focus on a corpus of fifty-five British, Irish, American and Australian press articles that have been published online. The aim will be to wonder how emotion is dealt with, especially in headlines, as compared to the first lines of the article itself and the brief summary that can be found on the Internet: what lexical tools do journalists generally use in each of those utterances and do they differ as time goes by? The research will hence be carried out both from a synchronic and a diachronic point of view so as to see whether around the same topic there are any differences to notice between newspapers depending on the political stance they reflect, the kind of readership they have or the overall context. Some focus will be put on the cases in which emotion results from a sensation that gives birth to a perception so as to analyze how it is expressed while pondering over the new idioms that may occur around this triad. The links between sensitivity and corporeality will thus be scrutinized to see if there are any recurring lexical patterns such as linguistic metaphors, and any cultural variants, whose origins will then have to be established. Within the framework delineated by the conceptual metaphor theory, the purpose will also be to trace the limit between emotion and emotionalism or sensationalism inside a rhetoric sometimes based on excess whenever the emotion expressed in the article is supposed to be aroused in readers, whether it be empathy or rejection. To do so, the emphasis will be put on negative topics such as hurricanes and typhoons which involve a collective emotion that might differ from an individual one and whose impact depends on the registers of speech and the styles used by journalists as they deal with natural phenomena that are both unique and recurring events.

Keywords

• cognitive linguistics
• Hurricane Florence
• the British / Irish / American / Australian press
• headlines
• lexical patterns
• new idioms