A STYLO-LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF SELECTED E-NEWSPAPER HEADLINES ON PARRICIDAL VIOLENCE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26436/hjuoz.2026.14.3.1761Keywords:
E-newspaper, headlines, parricide, stylo-linguistic analysis, violenceAbstract
Scholarly research is awash with the examination of violence-related reports in newspapers to determine different psychological and sociological factors responsible for these crimes. However, violence relating to parricide from e-newspaper headlines remains one area which has scarcely been explored by scholars, especially from linguistic orientations. This study examined a stylo-linguistic analysis of selected e-newspaper headlines on parricide to unravel the linguistic choices employed by the writers to convey in-depth and subtle meanings. The theoretical framework adopted for the study is Halliday’s functional stylistics, which highlights the meeting point between language use and social meaning of texts, and also sees language as a coding method of constructing what is implied in a given text. Thirty-six e-news headlines on parricide between November 2022 and January 2023 were sampled from different online sources and were closely read to identify, classify and analyse, through a qualitative approach, the stylo-linguistic resources used by the news writers to communicate their intended messages. It was found from the corpus that the writers preponderantly made use of catchy hypotactic nominalization, prominent paratactic lexicalization, accusative and incriminating verbal elements, copious complex complementation and adversative adverbials to synthetically and systematically portray the ‘who’ (offenders/accomplices), the ‘whom’ (victims/casualties), the ‘how’ (weapons used), the ‘why’ (reason for/purpose of the crime) and the ‘what next’ (consequences/results of the heinous crimes).
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