CDA of News Headlines on Covid-19 Pandemic in the New York Times

Natasa Stojan
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected the whole world and had a huge impact on social and economic development of many countries. Various aspects of the world health crisis have been studied by different researchers in various fields od science. Our study analyses newspaper headlines published in The New York Times from January of 2020 till December of 2021. The aim of the paper is to analyse headlines that deal with various aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The methodological procedure applied in this qualitative- quantitative study comprises two levels of analysis, linguistic and intertextual, based on the three-dimensional model of analysis, developed by Norman Fairclough, combined with Teun van Dijk’s concept of microstructures and macrostructures. CDA is applied in the analysis since it offers the most appropriate theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of language which cannot be separated from the social, political and economic contexts as well as power relations that are channelled through language within those contexts. Linguistic analysis comprises different levels: lexical, thematic and stylistic. Furthermore, the role of direct and indirect speech is also investigated within the framework of intertextuality, whereby reporting mode and sources are analyzed. Linguistic analysis of newspaper discourse shows that health topics are intertwined with political ones, which reflects the fact that situational context is imbued with politics. We can agree with Sacco and Muddiman (2015), who claim that The New York Times mostly uses traditional headlines that introduce the main topic of the article, and they are generally short, concise and unambiguous, however, the results of the analysis show that there are also examples of figurative language, which contributes to the linguistic diversity of newspaper headlines.

Presentation