Recursos lingüísticos en la titulación periodística costarricense: el caso de <i>La Nación</i> y el diario <i>La Extra</i>.

Abstract

The following article analyses the linguistic strategies involved in the headings’ writing process used by two of the most important Costa Rican newspapers:  La Extra, main sensationalist journal, and La Nación, main dominant reference diary. Morphological, syntactic, and semantic mechanisms will be analyzed, along with other aspects such as suffixation, prefixation, initials, tropes (metaphor, allegory, synecdoche, metonymy), shortenings, idioms, direct and indirect style –of the reproduced speech source-, agent and passive auxiliary elision, and the use of the inclusive “we”. The conclusion points out that headings’ linguistic form tends to be prompted by ideological and stylistic factors; therefore, techniques focused on language economy predominate. The pursue of concision and phatic influence on readers motivates the syntactic structure and chosen vocabulary. In La Extra, the mechanisms used in the headlines’ conformation are similar to those sensationalist procedures taken into account in other Latin American countries –such as slang preference-, while La Nación shows some differences compared to other newspapers of dominant reference –like the low presence of nominalization processes.