Linguistic Features and Newsworthiness: an Analysis of News style

In this paper, we present a preliminary study on the style of headlines in order to evaluate the correlation between linguistic features and newsworthiness. Our hypothesis is that each particular linguistic form or stylistic variation can be motivated by the purpose of encoding a certain newsworthiness value. To discover the correlations between newsworthiness and linguistic features, we perform an analysis on the basis of characteristics considered indicative of a shared communicative function and of discriminating factors for headlines.