covered the music of language, just as William Somerset Maugham, an English writer, once said, “If you could write lucidly, simply, euphoniously and yet with liveliness you would write perfectly.” (Maugham, 1949: 36)
We take great pleasure in the musical sounds in writing or a conversation. Realizing this, news reporters also try their best to choose words full of rhythm to give deeper inspiration to their readers. Therefore, numerous figures of phonology such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, paregmenon and various kinds of repetitions are favored for bearing music feature. What’s more, In English headlines’ writing, the first three are in the most common use.
As phonological figures, alliteration, assonance and consonance can all contribute to the sound effect of writing. Employing such phonetic devices, news headlines have a special magic to hold people’s attention, and they will stimulate people’s aesthetic feeling and provide them a lot to imagine.
3.1 Alliteration
All the three figures mentioned are rhetorical devices that have more to do with sound than the sense of words for rhetorical effect. They all have one thing in common, i.e. to make use of phonology to produce a musical effect or to give vivid expression, and they are either rhythmic or true to life in reading. Among them, however, alliteration is the most frequently used in English headline writing.
Alliteration is the recurrence of the same initial sound (not necessarily letter) in words in close succession(卢炳群, 2003: 7). As is seen in the following sentence: Magnetic, Magnificent Meryl (范家材, 1992: 205) 美貌动人、美名高筑的美瑞莲
In the example above, alliteration is used for emphasis. Actually, the initial sound /m/ repeats for 3 times without any interruption which makes the lines special and unforgettable.
Of Mice, Men and
Medical Concern (Financial Times, Mar.4, 2005)
实验鼠、人类和医学之忧
According to the report, evidence linking certain drugs and products of food industry to risk of heart attacks and cancer respectively has led to a sharp question: how reliable are animal tests of product safety? To spur readers to dig into the long and complicated story, the headline writer decides to introduce such rhetoric device as alliteration to make the news headline more attractive and inviting. Thereby, the headline we now read has the word “Men” to replace “Human” and the word “Mice” “Animal”, which is actually more precise in meaning. In this way, the heading is concise but powerful with a sounding and phonological effect.
Although good for musical effect, alliteration has no correspondent in Chinese language. When alliteration is put into Chinese word for word, the Chinese version would often appear to be absurd. Therefore, alliteration is usually untranslatable directly. Instead, we have to take other figures such as personification, parallelism into consideration although they are not corresponding with alliteration in musical effect or language formation.
3.2 Assonance
Assonance is the use of the same or related vowel sounds in successive words to create a musical rhythm and sound effect in language (覃海洋, 1998: 153). Assonance is one of the important phonetic rhetorical devices which is widely used to increase rhythm and expressiveness of proverbs, poetry,
essays and comments. As is shown in the following proverb:
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
Here, assonan
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