Analyzing Ambiguity in Newspaper Headlines: The Case of Crash-Blossoms

Abstract

The current study was conducted to explore ambiguous newspaper headlines in two leading Pakistani dailies, namely Dawn and The Express Tribune, focusing on “crash-blossoms”, which are kind of headlines that initially confuse the readers with reference to their interpretation, due to syntactic shortcuts, and polysemy. Twenty-five ambiguous newspaper headlines were purposively selected from daily Dawn and The Express Tribune, which involved 24 proficeint undergradute readers. The findings of the study reveal that structural ambiguity is the most common type of ambiguity incorporated, more often inadvertently, which is followed by lexical, pragmatic and referential ambiguities respectively. From the findings it is revealed that the participants majorely relied on world knowledge, and structural re-parsing to disambiguate the headlines. Moreover, the study found about how the newspaper readers in a non-native English speaking context, particularly Pakistani readers in this study, navigate through ambiguous headlines make use of their cultural and linguistic knowledge, resultantly making new insights for Pakistani newspaper headline writers about improving clarity and contributing to media discourse in a non-native English context.