CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF SYNTACTIC MODELS OF RUSSIAN AND PERSIAN POLITICAL INTERNET NEWS HEADLINES

Abstract

As a result of the development of political relations between Iran and Russia, and the increase in the number of translations of political news, there is currently a need for a study to consider the linguistic features of news headlines in Russian and Persian languages. In this work, based on 300 headlines selected from 21 – 27 April 2021, from four news sites IRNA, ISNA, RIA NOVOSTI and GAZETA.RU, we intend to compare syntactic models of political news headlines in Russian and Persian languages. The novelty of the study lies on the fact that for the first time the syntactic models of political news headlines are examined in a contrastive manner on the material of the Russian and Persian languages. The results of our study show that the frequency of the phrase headings in Persian is much higher than in Russian, and in some cases sentence headings are translated to Persian by both sentence headings and phrase headings. Among syntactic structures, simple sentences are widely used in political news headlines in both languages.

Extended abstract:

The headline is one of the main and key elements in any text, especially in the news. It can be defined as the first element of each text that affects the readers' minds and attracts their attention. As a result of the development of political relations between Iran and Russia, and the increase in the number of translations of political news, there is currently a need for a study to consider the linguistic features of news headlines in Russian and Persian languages. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time, the syntactic models of political news headlines are examined in a contrastive manner on the material of the Russian and Persian languages. In this work, based on a comparison of the syntactic models of 300 Russian and Persian headlines, selected from 21 to 27 April 2021, from four news sites IRNA, ISNA, RIA NOVOSTI, and GAZETA.RU, we came to the following conclusions:

1. Among our materials, the word headline is not found in either Russian or Persian. This means that this type of headline is rarely used in political news in both languages.
2. The frequency of the phrase headings in Persian is much higher than in Russian.
3. When translating sentence headings from Russian into Persian, both sentence headings and phrase headings can be used. Phrase headings are more popular in Persian.
4. The results of the analysis show that 107 out of 150 (71.33%) Russian examples and 85 out of 150 (56.66%) Persian examples are sentence headings. 94 of the sentence headings in Russian are simple sentences, and 13 are compound sentences. In Persian, 81 of the sentence headings are simple sentences and 4 are compound sentences. Thus, we can conclude that simple sentences are widely used in political news headlines in both languages.
5. Quoted sentences are often found in the headings of both languages, but they are almost four times more numerous in Persian than in Russian.
6. The parceled construction is one of the syntactical models of political news headlines in both languages. In such constructions, with the help of punctuation marks (full stop, exclamation mark, question mark, ellipsis), the headline is divided into two parts, between which there are semantic, grammatical, and also communicative relations. Parceled construction among Russian and Persian news headlines occurs in 13 cases out of 150 (8.66%).
7. The special construction of headlines with a colon among Russian news headlines is common, but this construction is very rarely used in Persian headlines. In such cases, the headings are separated into two parts by a colon.