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A Linguistics-Stylistic Analysis of Newspaper Headlines of Metele Attack On Nigerian Army by Boko Haram Insurgents

The paper examines newspaper headlines captions of Boko Haram attack on the Nigerian Army Base in Metele, North East Nigeria of 18th November, 2018. Thirty newspaper headlines from twelve daily Nigerian newspapers published between November 21st and December 15th were selected. The headlines were subjected to three levels of linguistics analyses: lexical, syntactic and semantic. Findings from the study reveal that journalistic writings are either presented to portray objective views, or to whip up psychological sentiments in the choice of words and expressions. It was further revealed that journalistic style of headlines writing may or may not conform with linguistic rules and conventions of the language used. The paper, therefore, suggests that journalists should consider linguistic inadequacies of their readers by presenting headlines and other captions in simple language; they should also place less emphasis on propaganda, sentiments and emotions in the writing of newspaper headlines.