Clickbait headlines through the prism of speech acts theory

Statement of the problem. The article discusses the peculiarities of YouTube video clickbait headlines. Some video makers are profit-conscious and deliberately headline their videos using eye-catching words that often have nothing to do with the real content in order to maximize the number of clicking the links. Such headlines aim at deceiving the recipients as for the content of the text or video, affecting their perception, attracting their attention and making them watch the video after all. Such headlines are known as clickbait, for they trap the reader or viewer with deliberately sensational or incomplete information. In this case promotional impact purposefully overrides the nominative function resulting in the peculiarity of the clickbait. The form of speech acts, including stylistic, lexical, syntactical, spelling and punctuation features, makes them stand out of other texts corpus. Particular attention is paid to discerning them as directive illocutionary acts and to proving that they meet all Searle’s requirements for such phenomena including illocutionary point, condition of sincerity, direction of fit. The purpose of the article is to analyze YouTube video clickbait headlines as directive illocutionary acts. Research methodology. The main method of research is qualitative content-analysis that involves revealing a specific meaning expressed with a clickbait headline as a significant element of a media text, as well as a communicative-pragmatic analysis aimed at identifying directive illocutionary force. Research results. Communicative success of clickbait headlines correlates with the “curiosity gap” manifesting itself in recipient’s information lacuna. The recipient should be able to bridge the former to avoid excessive cognitive attempts, clickbait headlines being a tool for that. Conclusions. Clickbait headlines analysis results in identifying them as directive illocutionary acts, for they foreground the perlocutionary function deliberately neglecting nominative one, thus manipulating an information recipient.