A headline of the internet news as a cognitive model of a situation

Changes in the modern media world keep the problem of studying news headlines on the Internet actual. In analyzing headlines it should be taken into consideration that news is a product to sell, that is why the news text is made considering the law of supply and demand. News editors of «peripheral» Internet resources have to deal with the controversy. On the one hand, they must use keywords in headlines for search results. On the other hand, they have to seek for the maximum uniqueness of a text. A recent tendency towards automated robot journalism manifests itself in the technologization of the process of news aggregation and production of simplest texts. The analysis of Yandex news compilation allows to compare similar news headlines and to reveal the linguistic means of news presentation. Headlines interpret the same news content in different ways and have different manipulative potentials. The initial cognitive model of a situation is performed in an Internet news headline. An event can be represented by mentioning participants and their actions, or an object of an action, or particular circumstances. A news text is an event message that is supposed to change the existing worldview, so a headline is formed as a narrative frame. Depending on what is in the focus (a participant of an event, an object or an activity), frames could be divided into «subject»-centred and action-centred. In this regard a headline is formed according to the classical scheme: the subject - the predicate - an object (an adverbial), that is implemented in a superficial structure of a simple sentence scheme. The locative (the place of an event) is extremely important for news. That word order of a simple sentence proves to be the most convenient for translations from English and into English. However, within a clear framework there is an opportunity to interpret the same event in different ways. The difference in covering the same event depends on the choice of a newsmaker (1), a description of the action (2) and its’ object (or circumstances) (3). The paper illustrates these opportunities, comparing and contrasting the headlines of Yandex news compilation with the same information content. Understanding the significance of a message depends largely on contextual awareness (national-cultural, political, etc.). In a “subject”-centred headline the choice of a subject and an object is of great importance as it forms the structure of a binominal judgment. The interpretation of an action in an action-centred headline is connected with the predicative that determines the connection between a statement and reality, and contains an assessment of actions. The emphasis in the frame content allows to actualize different aspects of an event.