THE ANALYSIS OF BBC NEWS HEADLINES STRUCTURES

This research delves the analysis of structural types used in BBC News headlines, recognizing the important role of these types as the reader's first encounter with a news article. This study utilizes Morley's (2000) sentence and phrase type theory and Brown & Miller's (1991) constituent structure theory. Using a descriptive qualitative method, this study aims to present and explain its findings. The data, consisting of 186 BBC headlines from July 2023, were carefully tabulated, displaying the frequency of occurrence of each structure type. The results highlighted three distinct sentence types, such as; simple sentences leading with 151 occurrences, complex sentences with 20 occurrences, and compound sentences with more limited occurrence of 3 occurrences. Further analysis by phrase type showed 11 headlines with noun phrase structures and 1 with verb phrase structure. The expected impact of this study is a positive contribution to the field of syntax, which encourages progress in scientific understanding.