On the omission of articles and copulae in German newspaper headlines

Abstract

This paper argues based on a corpus-linguistic study that both omitted articles and copulae in German headlines are to be treated as null elements NA and NC. Both items need to be licensed by a specific (parsing) strategy known as discourse orientation ( Huang, 1984 ), which is also applicable in the special register of headlines. It is shown that distinguishing between discourse and sentence orientation and correlating these two strategies with λ-binding and existential quantification, respectively, naturally accounts for an asymmetry in article omission observed in Stowell (1991).