Specifics of appealing headlines in Russian mass media materials dedicated to science

Abstract

The article attempts to study the impact of headlines in science news and popular science messages in Russian in the news agencies, the Internet newspapers, on the websites socio-political media, as well as on the popular science sites. It is noted that the theme of science occupies one of the last places in the hierarchy of news content, which significantly limits the possibility of getting news data on the information agenda. Thematic varieties of effective headings are given, in which constants such as health, life safety, and sexual relations are distinguished. Linguistic and stylistic markers of clickbait headings are considered, among which quantitative numerals, colloquialisms, hyperbole created by using the epithet or the superlative degree of the adjective. The analysis of syntactic features leads to the identification of typical sentence schemes in which click-through ratio triggers are determined, forcing the user to turn to the article for details. The organicity of the appealing headlines of the concept of infotainment, which is a productive mechanism for popularising science on Russian popular science sites, is approved. It is indicated that the corpus of appealing headlines on these resources is characterised by individual author’s decisions embodied with the help of a comic mode, allusions, precedent texts and quotes, differentiation of the “image” of the addressee, oxymoron, antithesis and grotesque. In the system of popularising science, appealing headlines become organic components of news, gamified, and animated messages.