Deixis and Clickbait in News Headlines of Vice

RINGKASAN In this digital era, news headlines are often simplified and exaggerated to attract readers’ attention so that they will click the news link, which is also known as clickbait. This strategy is often used at the expense of accuracy of the actual content the news headlines refer to. This situation suggests the importance of studying how news headlines are used in today’s online platforms. News headlines with clickbaiting features can be identified from certain linguistic patterns, especially through the use of “deixis”. This study aims to investigate how frequently “deixis” shows up in news headlines a top online news site as Vice. I collected 112 headlines from vice.com. I use a framework of “deixis” provided by Levinson (2004) to identify the “deixis” in this study. I myself, as the researcher, acted as the main instrument in this study. I used a combination of qualitative and quantitative approach to analyse and present the data. The findings reveal that, firstly, from the total number of the collected headlines, the analysis shows that 34 (30.4%) headlines contain the use of “deixis”. As three deixis-containing headlines have two types of deixis each, the total number of the deixis found is 37. Further analysis reveals that out of 37 (100%) deixes, there are 26 (70%) person deixes, 4 (11%) spatial deixes, 4 (11%) discourse deixes, 3 (8%) temporal deixes, but no (0%) social deixis.. Finally, it can be concluded that the occurrence of deixis in the news headlines collected is quite frequent. Four types of deixis can be found as person deixis dominates with the highest number of occurrences while social deixis does not occur in the headlines. Furthermore, the appearance of deixis in news headlines may serve several purposes, mainly to shorten and simplify the headlines for the sake of effectiveness in attracting readers. This is related to the strategy to gain as many clicks as possible. I suggest that journalists and news readers consider some aspects of language in writing and reading news articles from the new perspectives found in this study. On the basis of the research findings, I suggest that future researchers should employ different perspectives or theories to explore other possibilities of how “deixis” interrelates with news headlines. I also suggest that they gather data from other sources of news headlines