Structural and pragmatic shifts in the development of newspaper headlines in the socialist and democratic period

Abstract

Abstract The newspaper headline is the first contact between the author and the recipient and in terms of stylistics, it is one of the compositional aspects of the text. In relation to the text itself, as well as to the communication partner, the headline fulfils an informative, engaging and especially in journalistic genres, persuasive function. Following the previous research focused on the 1960s, the aim of the study is to analyse and compare headlines in Slovak newspapers in the period of totalitarian and democratic establishment with a focus on the journalistic genre. The research sample, excerpted from the official discourse of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (1948 – 1956, 1961 – 1970) and the more recent Slovak mainstream e-discourse (2011 – 2021), contains almost 800 headlines to monitor the developmental tendencies of a given text component under the influence of changed extra lingual conditions. The aim of the research is to verify the expected linguistic and communicative modifications captured, for example, in a freer approach to the use of language. The given assumption expected at the structural-pragmatic level is conditioned by the dismantling of political-ideological control of the socialist period. At the stylistic-pragmatic level, we also assume a more direct and qualitatively more elaborate expressiveness in the language.