ABSTRACT
The first fold of the aim of this study was to investigate the pragmatic gravity of the semantic compositionality of news headlines; the second fold of the aim of this study was to investigate violating Grice’s principle of Cooperation as a linguistic model to calibrate the communicative weight of that pragmatic gravity; accordingly, two proposals emerge throughout this study: the first is that the semantic weave, of news headlines, is normally charged with a great pragmatic capacity which serves, by proxy, the interests of various agents of the communicative continuum; the second is that violating Grice’s Maxims (quantity, quality, manner, and relevance) is applicable to news headlines, and that can calibrate the magnitude of that pragmatic capacity. To achieve this two-fold aim of this study, the researcher followed an exploratory qualitative methodology; the corpus of the available related literature has been scrutinized, by the researcher, in a survey-like approach, to establish enough evidence that can augment the argument and the proposals of this study; in addition, it should be stated that a discretionary reflexive assertions, reflecting the opinion of the researcher, have been given within the summary sections of the literature review; by the same token, a discretionary tabulation of the practical examples, which have been scattered within the corpus of the related literature, to allow a unified cohesive understanding in regard to the proposals of this study. Findings of this study confirm the existence of the pragmatic gravity of the semantic weave of the news headlines; findings revealed that the semantic weave, of the news headlines, is not dictated, contrary to what has been acknowledged within the bulk of the available literature, by only the economic and the limited space demands of a given newspaper, but, on the contrary, that semantic weave is structured to have a pragmatic impact on the intended readers; findings also confirm that tracking the violation of Grice’s maxims (quantity, quality, manner, and relevance), within news headlines, can be an effective linguistic model to reveal, calibrate, and evaluate the pragmatic communicative aspects of news headlines. As a result, this study has come up with various conclusions and recommendations.