Monografico_5_EN_Doxa_31_Analysis_of_the_discursive

[Ex. 55]. From Lezo to Covadonga: heroic deeds define Vox’s campaign (ABC, 13/04/2019)

There are also metonymies:

[Ex. 56]. Ortega Smith and Monasterio, the faces of Vox in City Hall and the Regional Government (ABC, 19/04/2019)

Nominalisations10 are also present, an example of which is the following headline in which an ironic reference is made to the “pleasant state of emotional and admiring exaltation” (Royal Spanish Academy -Real Academia Española-, 2014), supposedly reached by the Vox leader when he pronounced his first campaign rally during a visit to the Covadonga sanctuary:

[Ex. 57]. Abascal, ecstasy in front of Don Pelayo (La Vanguardia, 12/04/2019)

As we pointed out in Mancera Rueda (2014), there are many headlines in the Spanish press with this type of dual-member structure in which the journalist uses a comma to reflect the reader’s oral pause and assimilate it to the elided copulative verb. However, in our corpus it is also possible to locate single-member structures such as the following, which consists exclusively of a nominal syntagma modified by one that is prepositional:

[Ex. 58]. Disgust aimed at Vox and the PSOE (El Mundo, 15/04/2019)

The headline shown in [Ex 58] is also a sample of what we commented on earlier about giving true value to a mere prediction taken from a survey. In this example, the negative judgement that the noun “boredom” implies could be understood as a reflection of the critical attitude of potential voters toward the two political parties mentioned in the headline. However, reading the news story reveals that the intention was to report on how discontent with PP leadership among the population of Ceuta and Melilla, which had governed in both territories for 18 and 19 years, respectively, could be channelled into an increase in votes for Vox and the PSOE in both territories, yet not in all of Spain, as the headline implies. Perhaps the ambiguity of this headline led to its replacement in the digital edition a few hours later by another in which the nominal structure is dropped as follows:

[Ex. 59]. Discontent with the PP turns into votes for Vox and PSOE in Ceuta and Melilla (El Mundo, 15/04/2019)

Likewise, in the headlines of our corpus it is common to find the pre-activation of implicit meanings through inferences that only readers who are aware of the current news will be able to interpret fully, as reflected in the following texts:

[Ex. 60]. Vox’s trident: still focused only on women, immigration and historical memory (El Confidencial, 14/04/2019)

[Ex. 61]. Queues for Vox do not reach the bookshops: Dragó and Abascal sell less than Sánchez (El Confidencial, 15/04/2019)

The headline in [Ex. 60] refers to the initiatives that Vox supported in the Andalusian Parliament, which received no support from the other parties. On the other hand, [Ex. 61] refers to the biography of Santiago Abascal, written by Fernando Sánchez Dragó (hence the reference to this writer in the headline), and that of Pedro Sánchez, thereby establishing a comparison between both in terms of the number of copies sold and at the same time highlighting that the influx of

10 The tendency toward the nominalization of headlines was already shown by Steel (1971: 13), for whom “the nominal group acquires [in this type of text] greater relevance and extension than in other styles of language”, or by Casado Velarde (1978: 103), who was able to notice how “very often in the headlines the fact that it is expressed with a verb in the body of the news is presented in a nominalized way”.