Metonymy in headlines of the modern Danish press (the political discourse)

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of metonymy in the headlines of the modern Danish press in the context of political discourse. Metonymy is an indispensable figure of speech of any language. The language of the press and, in particular, the headlines of articles are characterized by expressiveness and brevity. The characteristic features of metonymic transfers are figurativeness, appreciation and the ability to preserve language resources because the descriptive constructions can be replaced by a single word. It is not surprising, therefore, that metonymy is often used in the headline complex of a news article. The aim of our study is to consider metonymy in Danish headlines in terms of frequency and typology. The research material is the headlines in electronic versions of three Danish newspapers: Politiken, Dagbladet Information and Jyllands Posten. The time interval is limited by the 2015 Folketing election campaign. This choice is dictated by the fact that, in the case of an election campaign, we have clear dates set by the government and the election period is particularly interesting in terms of political discourse. As a result, we can say that metonymy is found in more than half of the headlines studied. In other words, metonymy is relatively frequently used by journalists in the headlines. The examples reviewed have shown that the reason for this is often to attract the attention of the reader and assess events or politicians. Among the types of metonymy, spatial and causal metonymy is the most widely used. Most often we see the metonymic transfer of the type “political party  politicians” or “politician  his/her activities”. Among the cases of attributive metonymy, we found interesting examples with political blocks, which are typical for the Danish political system (for example, red block and blue block), where the colour indicates the political views of these blocks.