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ides, some scholars also express their understanding. An Americanjournalistic scholar Bruce H. Westley believed that a headline is “any line orcollection of lines of display that precedes a story to introduce or summarize it”(Westley, 1972:141).

Chapter 2 Theoretical Framework and Research methodology

Relevance Theory, as an influential approach to the study of humancommunication, was proposed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986. Since its appearance, ithas aroused the great attention of various scholars both at home and abroad. Due to itsstrong explanative force, this theory has been widely employed to analyze humancommunication, either in the form of verbal language or written language. In thischapter, the Relevance Theory is discussed in detail, including the nature of humancommunication as an ostensive – inferential communication, as well as the mostimportant concepts of relevance and cognitive context, which helps to reveal thenature of communication of different kinds. In addition, the methodology of this paperis also described in the second part as an attempt to make it clear what kind ofresearch method is adopted and how it is applied in the analytical process.

2.1 Theoretical Framework: Relevance Theory
Relevance Theory, as a new approach to pragmatics, was first proposed by DanSperber and Deirdre Wilson in their co-works Relevance: Communication andCognition in 1986. It has strong explanative force in exploring the nature of humancommunication by combining various disciplines, including pragmatics, cognition,psychology, linguistic philosophy etc. which has drawn great attention of linguists athome and abroad. It has not only pushed the development of cognitive pragmatics, butalso provided a broader study platform and new perspective for the investigation intohuman communication.

2.1.1 Ostensive – Inferential Communication
The study of human communication has always been a key research issue inlinguistics. Various scholars have made attempts to explore the nature of linguisticcommunication. And code model held a dominant position at the initial stage. Itsmajor standpoint is that communication is a process of encoding and decoding message: the speaker encodes his thoughts into language while on the other side thehearer decodes the language symbols based on semantic and syntactic rules oflanguage system. Thus this theory mainly focuses on explicit communication. Later,Paul Grice and David Lewis put forward another model, the inferential model,according to which, communication is realized by inferring the deeper meaning ofutterance. In this model, context is first taken into consideration, shifting the scholars’attention to implicit communication gradually. However, neither of the two modelscould provide a full explanation of language communication. Sperber and Wilsonbelieve that language communication actually involves both coding and inferentialmodels. Thus by combining the two models, they put forward a more comprehensiveostensive-inferential communication model. And in this paper, this model is adoptedto explain newspaper headline communication. And it is believed that this model canexplain not only oral communication, but also the communication in written form.

Chapter 3 An Analysis of English Newspaper Headlines from the .........52-72
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