Syntactic Government in Nigerian Newspaper Headlines

Several studies on Nigerian newspaper headlines have focused heavily on issues of style, language use, ideology and meaning but little has been done from a syntactic perspective. This study, therefore, examines the nature of syntactic government in the headlines from a generative grammar approach. The data for this study comprises newspaper headlines randomly collected from national Nigerian newspapers and are subjected to syntactic analysis with a view to describing the nature of syntactic government in Nigerian newspaper headlines. It is discovered that while all forms of government operate in the headlines, head-government and theta-government are not always visible at S-structure of the headlines. Also, lexical and Antecedent-government operate only in headlines where AI movement has taken place