SEMANTIC AND STRUCTURAL PECULIARITIES OF MULTIMODAL ECONOMIC TEXTS HEADLINES IN NEWSPAPER "THE ECONOMIST"

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of structural and semantic peculiarities of the interaction of verbal and non-verbal elements of the headline complexes of economic texts in «The Economist» magazine. The modern information environment has grown immensely. The way its content is created, transmitted, and perceived has evolved in line with technological progress: messages have turned into multimodal units that affect several channels of perception simultaneously. Obviously, this has influenced the process of decoding information on the recipient's part, mobilising the linguistic means of communicative and pragmatic influence of mass media. The headline remains the key element able to directly influence the decision to read a particular journalistic material. On the pages of modern media, it appears as a multifaceted multimodal construct that not only informs about the topic and content of the article but also attracts the reader's attention, helps to understand the essence of the message and also poses communicative and pragmatic potential thus it can shape the attitude of the recipient by creating shades of meanings or adding the appropriate emotional and evaluative colouring to the text. Each media resource has its style of presenting material and organising headline complexes. The latter differ within the media source depending on the form (printed or digital) and the thematic sections inside the issue. The majority of headlines are built using a combination of verbal and non-verbal elements. Taking into account the power of the visual channel of information perception, the key role in such headline complexes is played by graphic elements in the form of iconic images creatively complementing verbal units, helping in such a way to attract the recipient's attention, encouraging him to read the material, and shaping the process and method of decoding information.