A Corpus-based Analysis of English Newspaper Headlines

Recently using English newspapers as a useful teaching tool for English has emerged among educators due to its easy accessibility and wide range of content. In this stream, in particular, English headlines seem to be catchy in getting learners interested and motivated. This study shows the analysis of the headlines by examining an actual sample corpus drawn from The Korea Herald Headlines Corpus (KHC). In addition to this, other corpora, the British National Corpus (BNC) Sampler Written, the British National Corpus (BNC) and a sample corpus drawn from The New York Times Headlines Corpus (NHC) by Chung (2006) were referred to for the purpose of comparisons. The corpus was then analyzed using Wmatrix, a software tool for corpus analysis and comparison. Wmatrix processed not only part-of-speech tagging using CLAWS POS tagger, but also semantic tagging using UCREL Semantic Alalysis System (USAS). In fact there are few discussions on the semantic analysis of headlines while there are already some on the linguistic analysis of headlines. Therefore, it would be meaningful to look over the results of semantic analysis.