Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching (JLLT)

Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching

Volume 8 (2017) Issue 2 (PDF)

pp. 137-154

Structural Configurations of Text Titles Containing Question Words

Sara Quintero Ramírez (Guadalajara, Mexico) /

Andrea Maylette Leyva Moo (Tabasco, Mexico) /

Miguel Ángel Fócil Salvador (Tabasco, Mexico)

Abstract (English)

Text titles are short sequences that summarize the content of the text they introduce (Rath 2010: 86), and ideally express its macrostructure (van Dijk 1990: 204). The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the most frequent structural configurations of a corpus constituted by 100 titles of blogs and magazine articles published in English on the Internet. We also have the goal to determine their main textual function. Previous research has focused on text titles formed by noun phrases. In this research, the titles we examined are all constituted by one question word in them. With this paper, we intend to contribute to syntactic studies, more particularly to those that focus on titles as an essential part of many textual genres. In order to analyze the corpus, we classify titles according to three different criteria: a) the question word in them, b) their grammatical form and c) their syntactic configuration. The main results of our analysis are as follows: a) the most frequent question word in the titles of the corpus is how, b) titles are most commonly presented in the affirmative form and c) titles have a strong tendency to be written in the simple present.

Keywords: Titles, question words, structural configuration, textual function

Abstract (Español)

Los títulos de textos son secuencias cortas que resumen el contenido del texto que encabezan (Rath 2010: 86), e idealmente expresan su macroestructura (van Dijk 1990: 204). El objetivo de la presente investigación consiste en identificar las configuraciones estructurales más frecuentes de un corpus constituido de 100 títulos de blogs y de artículos de revistas escritos en inglés y publicados en la Web. Asimismo, pretendemos determinar su función textual más importante. Investigaciones previas se han enfocado en estudiar los títulos de textos que están formados por sintagmas nominales. En la presente investigación, examinamos títulos que están conformados por una palabra interrogativa. Mediante este artículo, deseamos contribuir con los estudios sintácticos, en especial, con aquellos que se enfocan en títulos como parte esencial de muchos géneros textuales. A fin de analizar el corpus, clasificamos los títulos de acuerdo con tres criterios: a) la palabra interrogativa, b) su forma gramatical y c) su configuración sintáctica. Los principales resultados de nuestro estudio fueron: a) la palabra interrogativa más recurrente en el corpus es how, b) los títulos se presentan mayormente en forma afirmativa y c) los títulos tienden a ser concebidos en presente de indicativo.

Palabras clave: Títulos, palabras interrogativas, configuración estructural, función textual

1   Introduction

This paper explores the most common structures and the main textual functions of a corpus of text titles. The common trait of the titles of our corpus is that all the texts analyzed have been produced in the World Wide Web and that all of them are constituted by the occurrence of a question word. In order to achieve the objective of this study, the paper is organized as follows. To begin with, a literature review section is presented. This section focuses on titles, their main functions, and their possible classifications. Moreover, there is a discussion about question words and their main purposes. In the methodology section, the nature of the corpus is explained as well as the procedure of our analysis. This part is supplemented by an analysis of the corpus from a syntactic and a textual viewpoint. The final part represents our conclusions section and the major findings of this study.

2   Literature Review

Titles are short text sequences that are created to summarize the content of the text they precede (Rath, 2010: 86). In other words, they should express the macrostructure of the text they introduce (van Dijk, 1990: 204). The title “should clearly indicate the subject and arouse interest. An ideal title should be rather short, informative and attractive” (Jamali & Nikzad 2011: 653).

Based on a study of Web texts, Adam, Delpech & Saint Dizier (2008) state that titles in this context may have different roles, some titles may play the archetypal role of summarizing the main contents of the website, as is the case with prototypical texts. However, “others deal with external considerations such as advertising, links to blogs, hints and advices of various kinds, just to cite a few.” (Adam et al., 2008: 303). In this research, we focus on titles of Web texts.

In a written text, titles are usually highlighted through different typological traits, containing, for instance, bold, colored, underlined or different font types which separate them from the rest of the text (Adam et al., 2008) in order to state the content of a text, providing general and relevant information. Moreover, the title guides the reader and determines the way he or she can read the text (Sánchez Carbó 2012: 138-139).

2.1 The Main Functions of Text Titles

As stated above, the main function of a title is to successfully summarize the content of the text for the reader (Rath 2010: 91). Creating a good title can therefore be considered a particular skill. Even if titles are supposed to be short and concise, the task to produce them can be challenging (Rath 2010: 86).

According to Fuente (1997/1998: 186), titles accomplish three main functions that come into play before the process of reading the respective texts begins: a denominative-differentiator, a referential, and an expressive function:

• The distinctive function consists of distinguishing a given text from others. Consequently, titles need to be unique, they have a convenient length, and they should be easy to remember.
• The referential one, is to present a summary of what the text is about, as Rath (2010) and Sanchez Carbó (2012) state. Fuente (1997-1998) asserts that some titles focus on the main topic of the text; some other titles focus on the main character of the text, especially in cases where the text is a story, a novel or a similar narrative text. Other titles focus on the space-time axis; others focus on the mode, the way in which the action takes place; finally, some titles focus on the addressee of the text (Fuente, 1997-1998: 190-193).
• The expressive one, intends to go beyond these points and awake the interest of the addressees, so that they feel like reading the text in full. The main goal of an author then is that the expressive function not interfere with the referential one. Sometimes, including the author’s name in the title attains this goal. However, when this is not the case, a pragmatic strategy consists in presenting titles in the interrogative mood (Fuente, 1997-1998: 193). This strategy intends to simulate a question that the addressee could ask him or herself before reading the text.

Furthermore, in the process of the reading, the title displays two more functions: an orientation function and a hierarchical function. The orientation function gives instructions to the addressee about how to read the text; whereas the hierarchical function focuses on the sequence in which the addressee should read the text.

• The orientation function consists of simplifying and facilitating the addressee’s understanding of the text. Moreover, it determines the perception of the text’s content. Indeed, the target of the title is to create certain expectations in the addressee about what he or she is about to read in the body of the text. Nevertheless, the title can provoke some false expectations and the text risks to disappoint the reader.

• The hierarchical function hints at the fact that titles guide the addressee along the steps that he or she should follow in the process of reading. This function is displayed on two levels: the intertextual and the intratextual level. On an intertextual level, this function focuses on distinguishing a text from other similar texts, i.e., a film trilogy (i.e., Pirates of the Caribbean, The Lord of the Rings, The Dark Knight) which presents a different title for each film that constitutes the trilogy. The intratextual function focuses on the distinction between the parts of a text, i.e., the different chapters of any novel (Fuente, 1997-1998: 195).

Once the given text has been read, the title displays a denominative-differentiating function again, (Fuente, 1997-1998: 199). The text subsequently plays a more important role for the reader and then, a functional fusion between the text and its title is produced.

2.2 Types of Titles

Titles can be classified according to different criteria. Sánchez Carbó (2012: 139) asserts that following Genette’s typology, there are rhematic titles, thematic titles, and mixed titles.

• Rhematic titles in series of books present generic designations such as letters, chronicles or uchronia.
• Thematic titles present another element of integration such as a specific place, a group of people, or the name of a character.
• Mixed titles are very common, especially in series of narrative texts, such as stories, novels, fiction texts or historic texts. They combine rhematic designations with thematic ones.

Jamali & Nikzad (2011: 654) consider three main types of titles according to their summarizing role:

• declarative titles, which include the main contents or conclusions of the text and not only the topic;
• descriptive or neutral titles, which only describe the topic but do not tell anything about the results; and
• interrogative titles, which present the title in the form of a question in order to attract the attention of the reader.

The authors state that there may be also compound titles, which combine two of the above-mentioned modalities.

According to a more syntactic perspective, previous research on titles suggests that the dominant structure is a noun phrase. The most common title structure is a series of specific noun syntagms that summarizes the content of the text, especially in scientific articles (Rath, 2010: 89). Soler’s (2009) research results confirm that the most common structure in titles of scientific articles and review papers is a noun phrase that states the object of study of the research.

Furthermore, Soler (2009: 50) asserts that other titles of her study present other syntactic configurations such as compound structures, question structures and full-sentence structures. According to the author, these title structures accomplish different purposes in relation to the genre of the paper to which they belong; for example, full-sentence titles are considered as a strategy to show assertiveness and high epistemic value in scientific articles; “therefore its use requires caution” (Soler 2011: 136).

According to Rath (2010: 97-98), some titles cannot easily be categorized as common forms. In the case of the example below, the title is an ambiguous question. Although it could be categorized as a question title, the example does not follow the common format because it fails to include disciplinary content terms that summarize the article it introduces. Nevertheless, these kinds of titles are very common in other textual genres, such as blogs and magazine articles of the Web, as will be seen in the analysis of this paper.  

On Whose Shoulders? (Rath 2010: 97)

In academic texts, such as research articles, noun phrases represent a functional element which yields coherence and summarization. Titles using this structure display more concise summarization than other title forms such as enigmatic questions or amusing phrases (Rath, 2010: 99). However, in the present research we focus on different textual genres. The main purpose, as stated above, is to examine those titles which display a non-prototypical structure. Thus, we focus on titles which contain a question word, that plays the role of an interrogative or relative pronoun, because we consider those titles are conceived that way in order to be enigmatic or amusing, as Rath (2010) states, and capture the reader’s attention.

Adam et al., (2008) affirm that titles that are formed by how-to questions express goals on various levels. In their study, the authors focus on three main aspects of the titles in the Web: a) typography, b) the grammatical content of the title, and c) the type of elements that follow the title. In our research, we will concentrate only on the second aspect, i.e., the content of the title. Therefore, we will examine the most common question words used in the corpus, the grammatical forms in which they are produced, and the most frequent verb tenses.

2.3 Constructions Containing Question Words

Since in this paper, we analyze titles that contain a question word, it is important to consider what authors state about question words and their possible syntactic roles, i.e., as interrogative and relative pronouns. According to Edmonson & Plank (1978: 383), relative and interrogative pronouns are formally identical in English. For Kuroda (1979), it is remarkable that the English words used as interrogative pronouns are also used as relative markers:

On the one hand, one could assume that it is a mere accident; the interrogative which and the relative which, or the interrogative what and the relative what, may be generatively unrelated words which happen to have the same phonetic shape, like bank (of a river) and bank (where one saves money). On the other hand, one might be able to assign certain common semantic characteristics to these two kinds of pronouns; their morphological identity would then be a natural consequence of their semantic identity (Kuroda, 1979: 135)

Hendery (2012: 48) states that in European languages the idea of evolution from interrogative pronoun to relative clause marker is very common, since there is an important body of literature that accepts such an idea (Cf. Comrie, 1981; Haspelmath, 2001; Fiorentino, 2007). In the specific case of English, according to Mustanoja (1960), there is a common origin between these two pronouns; however, at a certain point there was a transition from interrogative to relative wh-pronouns. This transition happened when the pronouns started losing their interrogative qualities in indirect questions. Afterwards, these pronouns were used to denote a previous referent. This is the way they displayed a more relative function:

English is an example of a language in which the interrogative-based relative clause markers entered via the ‘low end’ of the Accessibility Hierarchy (Hendery, 2012: 49)

With regards to most prototypical interrogative constructions in English, these have a common syntactic characteristic, i.e., the question word occupies the initial position, as in the first example below, but in less prototypical constructions, it can also occupy the last position, as in the second example below (Olesky, 1977: 43).

Where did she sleep?

She slept where? (Olesky 1977: 44)

However, according to Olesky (1977), the question of the last example is not a genuine question, since it does not have the goal of asking for the information relating to where someone sleeps. This question focuses on asking the addressee for the repetition of a genuine question. The most common interpretation for this construction is that it is a question about the previous discourse, so it is an echo question. Consequently, in our corpus of titles interrogative constructions such as this one are rare.

Furthermore, in everyday discourse, it is possible to find a construction with two question words:

Who went where? (Olesky 1977: 45)

This is the case in the above example, where the first question word (who) occupies the initial position; whereas the second question word (where) occupies the last position of the construction. We will see if there are any titles of the corpus constituted by two or more question words such as in this example.

According to Lewandowska (1973: 68), the main difference between a prototypical relative construction and a prototypical interrogative construction with a wh-word is that in the first construction, there is a noun in the matrix sentence which is the same as the one in the embedded sentence. In other words, in a relative construction there must be a co-referential noun in the basic structure. Otherwise, the construction is rather interrogative. Therefore, the basic form of the noun phrase in a relative construction is: Det1 N1 [Det2 N2], “under the condition of co-referentiality of N1 and N2” (Lewandowska, 1973: 68), as in the following example:

The boy who is coming here is a friend of mine (Lewandowska 1973: 68)

Schmied (2013) states that a relative clause meets three requirements:

• it contains a subject and a verb;
• it begins with a relative pronoun or a relative adverb;
• it functions as an adjective.

The relative construction has two possible prototypical patterns:

• relative pronoun + subject + verb, and
• relative pronoun (as subject) + verb.

In the analysis, we will examine whether the relative constructions of the titles meet these three requirements.

3   Methodology

3.1 The Corpus

In the present research, we intend to present the most relevant functions that titles of different texts can display at a syntactic and a textual level. We based our study on a corpus of 100 titles of magazine articles and texts in blogs and websites. As  was stated before, all the titles were collected from Web texts. The number of text genres that constitute the corpus is presented in Table 1:

Number of Titles	Text Genres
50	Magazine articles
50	Texts in blogs and websites
100	Total

                            Table 1: The Corpus

Additionally, all the titles have a question word in them. This question word could convey either the role of interrogative pronoun or the role of a relative clause marker.

3.2 Classification of the Corpus

The different titles that constitute our corpus have been classified according to different criteria. The first criterion is the type of question word used in the title. This criterion permits to detect the type of information that is highlighted by the question word as the textual strategy evoked.

The second criterion is the polarity of the construction presented in the title, i.e. the affirmative, negative or interrogative form. The grammatical form allows us to categorize relevant grammatical information about the titles. In this section, the syntactic functions of the constructions in the titles -  relative clause or an interrogative construction - are also examined.

The third criterion used to examine the corpus is the tenses of the verbs in the titles. This criterion not only offers syntactic information about the respective titles, but also pragmatic information about the communicative intention of the author of the titles, since the use of a specific tense can be considered as a textual strategy to attract the reader’s attention and invite him or her to continue reading the text body.  

4   Analysis

4.1 Question Words Used in Text Titles

First of all, it can be stated that not a single title in the corpus is formed by two- word questions. Following the first criterion according to which our titles are examined, the corpus reveals that the most frequently used pronoun is how (49/100) and the least regularly used is which (with only 3/100 frequencies). The first fact leads us to conclude that titles containing a question word tend to introduce a more directional text that communicates to the readers the procedure they have to follow so as to accomplish something, as happens in (1-3):

1. How to Clean Your Makeup Brushes the ‘Right’ Way

(http://www.marieclaire.com; 24-06-2016)

2. How to Comb Curly Hair Men

(http://www.findhealthtips.com; 22-12-2015)

3. How to learn efficiently

(http://lemire.me/blog; 30-12-2014)

As Adam et al. (2008: 304) affirm, titles that are formed by how-to constructions express a communicative purpose which is to tell readers how to accomplish a specific task. This is also the case in our corpus, where these titles have a frequency of 19/100 how-to titles. In other words, out of the 100 text titles of our corpus, 19 titles contain the how-to construction.

Moreover, the question word which is the least frequently used one (3/100), since which is an interrogative pronoun that asks for a specific person or thing from a group. This implies that most times, the which-construction requires explicit information to go with. We consider that these characteristics do not coincide with the idea of shortness and conciseness of prototypical titles (Rath 2010, 86, Jamali & Nikzad 2011: 653). Indeed, shortness is not easy to obtain if which is used, as can be seen in (4), which represents a title consisting of 12 words:

4. Which Comes First in Contemporary Music Technology: the Musician or the Machine? (https://thump.vice.com; 10-02-2016)

Certainly, titles in our corpus where which is used require more words to make them complete. The average number of words in these titles is 11, whereas in the titles with other pronouns, the average number of words ranges from 6, (in the case of where), to 8, (in the case of what and why):

Question Word	Average of Words per Title
how	7
what	8
when	7
why	8
where	6
who	7
which	11

Table 2: Title Length in Terms of Words

In Figure 1, the distribution of the pronouns in the corpus can be observed. As was stated before, how is the most frequent pronoun used in the titles of the corpus (49/100), followed by what (18/100), when (10/100), and why (8/100). Furthermore, as mentioned above, the least frequent pronouns are where and who (6/100 each)  followed by which (3/100):

Figure 1: Distribution of Pronouns

4.2 Polarity Used in Titles

The second criterion employed to analyze our corpus is the polarity used in the titles. As can be observed in Figure 2, most of the titles, (79/100), are in the affirmative form. Moreover, less than one fourth of the corpus (16/100) is in the interrogative. Finally, only 5 out of the 100 titles are in the negative form:  

Figure 2: Polarity  

Jamali & Nikzad (2011) state that in specific textual genres, such as academic papers, the most common and recommended title is the one that is presented in the affirmative form, since it offers the greatest amount of information to the reader. Even apart from titles of academic papers, which we did not consider in our corpus, the tendency of the affirmative form being used in titles could be documented, as is the case for blogs (5-6) and magazine articles (7-8). We consider that through the affirmative, titles express more authenticity than if they were written in other forms. Thus, in the corpus this is the most common grammatical form in which titles are written:

5. Where to Buy the Best Caviar Online

(https://www.thespruce.com; 20-04-2017)

6. The five minutes in the morning when we’re normal

(https://buckymybabyfanfics.tumblr.com; 15-07-2016)

7. What food people were obsessed with the year you were born

(http://www.marieclaire.com; 05-06-2016)

8. How to evaluate the design of a website

(https://www.sketchdeck.com/blog/how-to-evaluate-the-design-of-a-website;
30-4-2017)

In our corpus, there are only five titles in the negative form. These titles figured in blogs and magazine articles, such as the one observed in (9):   

9. When death doesn’t mean good-bye

(http://www.nationalgeographic.com, 11-03-2016)

In the corpus, there are two titles that contain what, another two titles containing why and one title in which when is used.

Therefore, if we go beyond the grammatical form of the titles, and try to determine the syntactic function of the wh-constructions in the corpus, 84% of these wh-constructions are relative clauses. 78 of the 84 relative constructions, i.e. 92.5% of them, are nominal relative clauses. These clauses are characterized by the fact that they begin with a wh-indicator and contain an antecedent noun phrase. Huddleston (1988: 158) states that these are also called fused relative constructions.

The fact that the above-mentioned 78 of the 84 relative constructions are nominal relative clauses is not surprising since the readers’ main task is to discover this antecedent or more precisely, this postcedent by reading the body of the text. Thus, the main goal of these titles is to evoke readers’ curiosity about the absent antecedent in the relative construction.

Thus, in our examples (10-12), what, where and how stand in for the missing antecedent (noun or pronoun) and are also part of the relative clause itself:

10. What 36 celebrities wore to court (http://www.marieclaire.com, 29-06-2016)
11. Where real beauty junkies get their best tips (http://www.refinery29.com; 24-04-2016)
12. How Urban parks are bringing nature close to home (http://www.nationalgeographic.com, 01-04-2016)

In example (10), the implicit noun phrase incorporated in the relative clause could be clothes, as in the phrase clothes that 36 celebrities wore to court. Moreover, in (11) the implicit noun phrase incorporated in the relative clause could be the place, as in the phrase the place where real beauty junkies get their best tips. Finally, in (12) the implicit noun phrase could be the way, as in the phrase the way urban parks are bringing nature close to home.

Finally, there are 16/100 interrogative constructions in the corpus. According to Jamali & Nikzad (2011), titles that designate the topic of the text in the form of a question make readers feel interested in the text because they appeal to their curiosity. Nevertheless, in their study, the authors state that “interrogative titles are more acceptable for scientific review articles than for research articles” (Jamali & Nikzad, 2011: 654). As stated above, in the 100 titles of our corpus, there are none from review or research articles. However, interrogative titles are documented in magazine articles (13-14) and blog texts too (15-16):

13. How Should We Talk About Science and Religion?

     (http://www.myjewishlearning.com, 23-02-2012)

14. Why do sharks actually attack humans?

     (http://www.discovery.com, 19/06/2015)

15. Which AFC south team improved the most during the offseason?

     (https://sports.vice.com, 23/03/2016)

16. Where can you recycle plastic bottles?

    (https://www.quora.com, 08/08/2016)

In the corpus, interrogative titles are produced with all question words except when, as can be seen in Figure 3:

Figure 3: Distribution of the Question Words in Interrogative Titles

The most frequent question word that is used with the interrogative form is how, as in example (13), with seven occurrences. This is reasonable, since how is the most frequent question word detected in the corpus. Furthermore, why (14) is the second most frequent question word with this grammatical form with three occurrences. Moreover, which (15) and where (16) were employed in two different text titles each. There was only one single occurrence each for the pronouns what and who used in combination with the interrogative form. Finally, in our corpus, the pronoun when was not found in the interrogative form.

4.3 Verb Tenses Used in Titles

In our corpus, there is no title that does not contain a verb. On the contrary, there are 16 out of 100 titles that contain two verbs such as in the examples below:

17. This Is The Woman Who Rocked Apple’s Keynote

     (http://www.refinery29.com, 13-06-2016)

18. What to Do After You’ve Been Betrayed

     (http://churchleaders.com, 01-06-2015)

19. Discover How To Reinvent Your Career From The Inside Out

                 (https://www.forbes.com, 18-04-2017)

20. Find out why I love Naturopaths

     (https://www.ellefitactive.com, 23-09-2015)

Example (17) contains a defining relative clause. The first verb of this title is in the simple present, and the second one is in the simple past. In (18), the first verb is in infinitive and the second one is conjugated in the present perfect. In (19) and (20) the first verb is in the imperative. In (19), the second verb is an infinitive; whereas in (20), the second verb is conjugated in the simple present.

Moreover, in the corpus there are 5 out of 100 titles that contain three verbs such as in (21) and (22):

21. This Is What Happens After You Die

     (http://www.huffingtonpost.com, 21/05/2015)

22. This Is What You Need To Do After Losing Your Job

     (http://www.businessinsider.com, 28/01/2013)

According to McGowan & Tugwell (2005: 83), the informative titles of academic papers are usually written in the past tense in the case of individual studies, and they are most often written in the present tense in the case of systematic reviews. Although in this study, as stated before, we do not focus on academic papers, but on blog texts and magazine articles with a question word in them, published in the Web, we can state that our findings are rather similar.

In our corpus, titles have a strong tendency to be written in the simple present, with 54 (42.86%) verbs out of 126 of our corpus being conjugated in this tense, as can be seen in Figure 4:  

Figure 4:  Distribution of Tenses

Moreover, it is also common to find titles that combine a question word and an infinitive. In the corpus, there are 28 (22.22%) titles with such characteristics. It is worth noting the frequency of how-to titles in directional texts, which make 19 (15.07%) in total. Titles in the simple past are also frequent in the corpus, since there are 19 (15.07%) verbs conjugated in this tense. Furthermore, 13 (10.32%) verbs are conjugated in the present continuous, six (4.76%) in the present perfect, five (3.97%) in the simple conditional, and one (0.79%) in the simple future tense.

The remarkable frequency of the simple present in the titles of our corpus is not unexpected since, according to researchers such as Alcoba Rueda (1983: 114), the present indicative is a tenseless form that is frequently used in newspaper headlines. This finding is also true for titles found in the Internet, and the corpus of this research confirms it. Furthermore, Zorrilla Barroso (1996: 102) affirms that through the indicative present, titles offer an impression of immediateness and realism, and these characteristics attract the reader’s attention.

Although the infinitive is the second most frequently recurring verb form in the titles of our corpus, this non-finite form is used only in directional texts and with how (23) and what (24) as question words. Thus, the titles of these texts announce a series of steps that readers have to follow in order to accomplish a certain task:  

23. How To Make Your Bookshelves Beautiful

     (http://www.vogue.co.uk, 02-04-2017)

24. What To Do In Case Of A Brownout

     (http://newyork.cbslocal.com, 16-07-2014)

As it can be observed, titles with a simple present verb or an infinitive form are very frequent in Internet texts, more particularly in magazine articles and blogs, since they constitute 65.08% (82 out of 126 verbs) of our corpus.

5   Conclusions

Based on the main objective of this paper, in this study, an overview of the most recurrent structural configurations of a 100-title corpus was presented. The two main traits that the titles of our corpus have in common are that all the titles analyzed have been produced in the Internet and that all of them are constituted by the occurrence of a question word.

With respect to the question word employed in the titles, the most frequently used pronoun is how, since this question word is employed in nearly 50% of the titles constituting the corpus. Moreover, with regards to the grammar form used, 79% of the titles of our corpus are written in affirmative form. Finally, with reference to tenses, 65% of the titles are contain the simple present tense or the infinitive form.

All these facts lead to the conclusion that titles with a question word, published in blogs and magazine articles, tend to introduce a directional text that communicates to readers the procedures they need to follow so as to accomplish a task. Furthermore, titles in blogs and magazine articles published in the Internet are produced to offer an impression of realism that attracts the reader’s attention.

The originality of this research consists in studying titles containing a question word, since previous research has focused more on titles formed by noun phrases. Moreover, previous studies mostly examined research articles and review papers, whereas this research has analyzed two main textual genres: blogs and magazine articles published in the Internet.

Finally, the findings of our research can contribute to syntactic studies, especially to those that concentrate on titles as an essential part of textual genres. Nevertheless, we are aware that the results of our study only present a broad overview of the structural configurations of titles containing a question word. Therefore, further research needs be done in order to offer more insights into this interesting topic, both in English and in other languages.

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Authors:

Sara Quintero Ramírez

Doctora en Estudios Literarios y Lingüísticos

Universidad de Guadalajara

Departamento de Lenguas Modernas

Calle Guanajuato 1045

Col. Alcalde Barranquitas. C. P. 44260

Guadalajara, Jalisco

México

E-mail: qsara@hotmail.com

Andrea Maylette Leyva Moo

Pasante de la Licenciatura en Idiomas

Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco

Av. México 101

Col. del Bosque. C. P. 86180

Villahermosa, Tabasco

E-mail: and._693@hotmail.com

Miguel Ángel Fócil Salvador

Pasante de la Licenciatura en Idiomas

Universidad Juárez Autónoma de Tabasco

Av. México 101

Col. del Bosque. C. P. 86180

Villahermosa, Tabasco

E-mail: miguelfc52@outlook.com