THE STYLISTIC STUDY OF THE HEADLINES OF COVID-19 REPORTS IN SELECTED NIGERIAN NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

This paper examines newspaper headlines captions of Covid-19 update. Thirty newspaper headlines sorted from three daily Nigerian newspapers published between June and December 2020 were chosen. The headlines were critically analyzed at two levels of linguistics analysis – graphological level and syntactical level. Halliday’s functional stylistic theory was adopted for the analysis of the graphological, grammatical and other notable language features. The findings showed that journalists do not use full stop at the end of headlines and they use declarative sentences more than any other type of sentences.