METAPHOR IN HEADLINES AS A METHOD OF VERBAL INFLUENCE

This article considers a metaphor as one of the techniques of the verbal influence in the newspaper headlines. The article headline means much for the text and plays a decisive role not only in understanding of it, but also builds up the reader’s opinions. The verbal influence is interpreted as the impact of a sender on a recipient (person or group) by means of the spoken or written language to change their attitudes, behavior, opinion, estimates, etc. There are two ways to use metaphors in newspaper headings: metaphor as a special expressive vocabulary unit, and text as an expanded metaphor of the heading meaning. In the first case, as a rule, the title is just a sentence or phrase in which some words have undergone a process of semantic derivation, and the other ones have retained their basic meaning. In this case, metaphor is an independent unit that complements or transforms the original meaning of the article. In the second case, the heading, which consists of a single word, acquires metaphorical meaning within the content of the article. A reader makes a move from a word with a specific meaning (which serves as an article heading) to the text-metaphor, then relates a title to a specific event, and returns to the title-metaphor. This is a kind of a game that takes the readers to the aesthetic pleasure and makes them think. The purpose of the title in this case is to indicate what the article is about. Such headlines are compact, but in terms of intensity and impact are not inferior to other titles. Examples have been taken from the newspaper «Soviet Russia» and «The Volga Star». Journalists in these newspapers address to acute social problems and adhere to the goal – to change the political views of the reader.