Wh-Headlines in German. Empirical Investigation and Theoretical Modelling of the Interface between Sentence Type and Genre

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Rita Finkbeiner
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 393766203

This project deals with so-called wh-headlines in German. Wh-headlines are independent verb-final clauses with a wh-element in left-most position that are only licensed in headlines or titles. For instance, in February 2017, the leading article's headline in the Frankfurter Rundschau about the hunger crisis in Africa read (1) 'Warum die Hungersnot uns angeht' ('Why the hunger crisis concerns us'). The article might as well have been entitled (2) 'Die Hungersnot geht uns an' ('The hunger crisis concerns us') or (3) 'Warum geht uns die Hungersnot an?' ('Why does the hunger crisis concern us?'). However, only (1) achieves certain effects in an optimal way: It suggests the belief that the hunger crisis in fact concerns us, and arouses curiosity about the subsequent text from which the reader can expect an answer to the 'Why'. By contrast, (2) is a mere statement which readers do not have to share and simply can skim through. As to (3), while also generating the expectation of an answer to the 'Why', this headline seems to require the answer from the reader, thus not immediately directing the attention to the text. Even though wh-headlines are frequently used in German newspapers (e.g., 'Was Konzernchefs verdienen', 'What CEOs earn', MOPO 21.9.2005; 'Wie die Hannoveraner ihre Zähne pflegen', 'How Hannover residents take care of their teeth' HAZ 14.9.2007; 'Wo Ralph Giordano irrt', 'Where Ralph Giordano is wrong' taz 29.5.2007), they only play a marginal role in linguistic examinations of the functions of news headlines. In this project, it is claimed that the special grammatical properties of these sentences (i.e., having illocutionary force but the form of a dependent clause) can only be accounted for if reference is made to the headline format as a text-linguistic category. The descriptive goal of the project is to comprehensively describe for the first time the relation between the syntactic and semantic properties of wh-headlines and their pragmatic and communicative functions by using corpus-linguistic methods. The theoretical goal is to answer the fundamental question which role genre plays in a system of sentence types, and how sentence types contribute to the constitution of genre. While such a mutual relationship often has been assumed, a theoretical model that adequately relates the two dimensions to each other is still missing, as are systematic empirical investigations of this matter. The project exploits large synchronic and diachronic newspaper corpora, which are quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed w.r.t. the distribution and development of wh-headlines. Beyond more specific findings as to the form, function, and change of wh-headlines, the project will also generate knowledge as to the more general principles of the interaction between sentence type, speech act and text, which also allow for a better understanding of the intricate interrelation between grammar as a conventional system and discourse as its usage potential.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants