Syntactic analysis of sports headlines in six Mexican online newspapers [Análisis sintáctico de titulares deportivos en la versión electrónica de seis periódicos mexicanos]

Abstract

This study deals with linguistic features found in Mexican sports headlines, particularly in syntactic features. A corpus of 300 headlines taken from six Mexican online newspapers was made. For detecting similarities and differences among them, three newspapers were nationwide (El Universal, Reforma and Excélsior), while the other three ones were specialized in sports (Esto, Récord and Estadio). Common features found were (1) a high frequency of verb phrases rather than noun or prepositional phrases, (2) no subject elision, and (3) presence of creative vocabulary and puns. Differential features were verb initial position, found in Reforma, the relative use of verbs in past tense (indicative mood) found in Esto, instead of the commonly used historical present tense, and verba dicendi presence in Excélsior after in-text citation.