Inching Ecopolitics: A Critical Use of Quantifiers in Newspaper Headlines as a Case of Encapsulating Information in Discourse

Discourse laws require linguistic messages to be clear and relevant. Nevertheless, in some writings like newspaper headlines, just the opposite linguistic phenomenon is observed. This way of conveying information is tricky because it lacks transparency. It is nothing but doing politics in the sense of exercising power and maintaining it through particular thinking strategies. Instead of giving the complete message, journalists for example, in newspaper headlines rather remove the number from the noun phrase. In other words, they encapsulate news, that is, they hide parts of the message in order to increase consumerism for those expecting the whole message. In return, nominalization is used as cues of over-generalization. Thus, questions such as, how many? How much? and Who? remain unanswered.
With this paper, we draw readers’ attention so as to successfully face this pervasive writing technique which highlights the way some people treat others. The same way, we sensitize writers to avoid semantically opaque sentences and discourses. The finding is that if newspaper headlines provide the main information, then, we are nearing ecopolitics in the sense of avoiding destructive behavior, that is, the study of politics as influenced by economic power.