Kauno dienos antraščių negatyvizmas

Abstract

The paper deals with the phenomenon of negativism in the headlines of one daily newspaper. Negativism is comprehended and defined as the attitude towards the extralinguistic reality when a writer is willing to stress negative aspects of reality in an objective or subjective way. Based on that negativism is analysed into several groups: the so-called informative negativism which reflects existing events or realia and non-informative or disinformative, which highlights unimportant aspects of the text. From the point of view of explicitness, negativism can manifest itself explicitly in the denotative (literal) and connotative (figurative) meaning of a word and implicit; conveyed on the prepositional level with the help of various linguistic devices such as implicatures, euphemisms and allusions. All the headlines of all types (primary or page headlines, secondary or paper headlines, paper subsection headlines, leads and captions) of the local daily called Kauno diena (round the year 2005) were analysed from the point of view of their denotation and connotation. The conclusion was drawn that overwhelming negativism in headlines (more than one third of headlines are negative in Kauno diena) is emotionally destructive and people should be aware of this in order to diminish its emotional impact.