Abstract:
The purposes of this study were to compare English syntactic structures used in sports news headlines, focusing on examining functional headline types and to compare the complexity of sport news headlines from two daily English language newspapers, which were the Bangkok Post and The Nation. The samples used in this study were sport news headlines including soccer, tennis, golf, cricket, and basketball reported in the Bangkok Post and The Nation. There were 548 headlines from each newspaper, issued during the months of January to June 2002.The results revealed that the most frequently used English syntactic structure found in both the Bangkok Post and The Nation was Verbal headlines with 95.82%T and 87.23% respectively. Considering functional headline types, headlines with the function of statement were frequently found in both the Bangkok Post and The Nation with 99.64% and 98.91%, respectively. Regarding the complexity of sport news headlines based on types of clauses, it was found that sports news headlines used in the Bangkok Post were more complex than those that appeared in The Nation with 23.54% and 10.40%, respectively. When considering complexity in sports news headlines based to the number of clauses, it was shown that both the Bangkok Post and The Nation used sports news headlines with two clauses about 23.54% and 10.40%, respectively. In addition, both newspapers used not only premodifying words in nominal headlines and postmodifying words in nominal headlines, but also both pre- and post- modification words in nominal headlines. However, the modifying words were found in greater number in the Bangkok Post than in The Nation.