THE USE OF RHETORICAL DEVICES FOR COMMUNICATIVE EFFECTS IN TABLOIDS HEADLINES: THE EXAMPLE OF THE SUN NEWSPAPER

Abstract

This paper interrogates the strategies employed by The Sun newspaper to garner social acceptance at its inception at a time when many newspapers were strong players in the industry. The Sun substantially deployed lingoliterary tools as rhetorical devices in its major headlines at inception in order to achieve different effects on the reading populace. Such rhetorical devices include foregrounding (to make ideas salient), metaphor (for the vividness of descriptions), alliteration (for euphony), paradox (for thought provocation), expletive semantics (for bewilderment and shock), and creative morphology (for lulling excitement). All these effects have resulted in the general readers’ delight and acceptance of the newspaper. The strategy has also accounted for the huge popularity of the newspaper in the Nigerian news publishing industry. This is marked by the transformation of the newspaper from a weekly at inception to a daily soon after. Deployment of rhetorical tools, therefore, is a stylistic strategy by The Sun for industry survival.