PRAGMATIC AND MULTIMODAL FUNCTIONS OF POLITICAL NEWS HEADLINES IN DIGITAL MEDIA

In this article, the political news headlines on digital media platforms are analyzed from a multimodal linguo-pragmatic approach. In contemporary digital journalism, headlines are used as a condensed multimodal unit that represents political events and directs the audience’s interpretation before entering the full text. The purpose of this article is to reveal the core pragmatic functions of headlines in political news and to analyze how framing, evaluative meaning, and illocutionary force are constructed using lexical means, multimodal marks, modality, and metaphors. The research material consists of political news headlines from major Western and Russian online media sources, such as The New York Times and RT. The findings of this research reveal that headlines are independent pragmatic tools that direct interpretation and perception in digital media environments.