Abstract:

In this paper we study the structure of the clause as a message according to Halliday (2004), in headlines related to accidents and crime reports of three Costa Rican newspapers: La Nación, La Prensa Libre and La Extra in order to assess the degree in which linguistic creativity in journalistic discourse reaches the syntactic level. The results show a preference for unmarked Theme clauses in La Nación and La Prensa Libre, for this organization is easier to read and process. It was in La Extra where more headlines containing marked Themes were used. This fact demonstrates that in La Extra there is a stronger tendency to choose an alternative distribution of the elements in order to particularize the event, and present it in a more appealing form to the reader, which contributes to meet its communicative objectives: informing an entertaining.

Keywords: Halliday; textual metafunction; clause as a message; newspaper headlines; discourse analysis