Headlines

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Headlines are composed of a line of words in larger letters as the title of each news post. Headlines should be specific enough to deliver important and complete messages, and one can even get the gist of the whole story from a direct, brief and accurate headline. Therefore, headlines serve as an effective tool to investigate and to provide insights into the social use and significance of tongzhi.

The struggle against discrimination is widespread in headlines across all the data.

Here we provide an analysis covering three levels, including lexical, grammatical and pragmatic aspects. First, we can take a closer look at the lexical level. A few expressions demonstrate the value of full equality with heterosexuals. Such words are like aizuida 愛最大 ’love is the most important’, pingquan 平權 ‘equality’ , gongping 公平 ’fair’, hefahua 合法化 ’legalize’, aizuidanchu 愛最單純 ‘love is pure’, xiangai 想愛 ‘want

love really much’, showing great affection in same-sex relationships and tongzhi are trying to show that homosexuals are no differenct from heterosexuals. The phrases emphasize the love between same-sex couples. That is, love is the same and marriage is based on love rather than gender.

The occurrences of tongzhi are far more than the number of tongxinglian in the headlines, which we have discussed earlier before in chapter 3 (see table 3.3). Tongzhi is a common expression of sexual minorities which are frequently used by tongzhi activists and news reporters (Wang 2005). Tongzhi indicates a form of solidarity,

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intimacy and liberty. Being affected by Chou, the use of tongzhi has increased popularity in academic studies and literature about same-sex intimacy. Headlines provided here are consistent with Chou (2002), who claims that tongzhi has begun to find favour with modern publishing. Tongzhi is a mark referring to sexual minorities (lesbians, bisexuals, and gay people). Some explanations are offered for the common use of tongzhi rather than tongxinglian. Because tonxinglian is not a term which derives from Chinese, acceptance of tongxinglian is imposed on people who have same-sex desire by gay culture in the West and heterosexuals. Plus, we can have considerable negative implications for tonxinglian when examining them in context.

Imperative forms, exclamatory style, the use of modal and direct speech are the major syntactic features in headlines. Verbs in imperative forms express the sense of extremely urgent and they are usually used for giving orders. For example, zhichi tonghun zao bamian! 支持同婚遭罷免 ‘calling for a recall of the people who support

same-sex marriage’ , ‘ni wuhui ziyou de yiyi le!’ 你 誤 會 自 由 的 意 義 了 ’you

misunderstand the meaning of freedom’, zaishuo wo nuer shi biantai, wo gen ta pingming! 再說我女兒變態我跟你拼命! ‘If you say my daughter is a pervert again, I

will fight it out with you.’ Another way in which the headlines reveals their stances contributes to exclamatory claims that express surprise, emotion or pain by means of exclamations. For example, lushi luqiuyuan banchu 9ci minfa xiuzheng guiji, henhen

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dalian hujiameng!’律師呂秋遠搬出 9 次民法修正軌跡，狠狠打臉護家盟！ ‘It was

a slap in the face for Family Guardian Coalition of Taiwan Religions when Attorney Lu proposed the history to the Civil code,’, fantonghun an zhe lai!, 反同婚暗著來 ‘to oppose same-sex marriage under the counter’, zai nage shidai, nanren han nanren de aiching cai shi zhuliu la 在那個時代男人和女人的愛情才是主流啦 ‘During that

period of time, a love relationship between men and women is the mainstream’, yi tan shijie 3 da tongxinglian chuantong, dang nanren koujiao caishi zhen nanren! 一探世

界3 大同性戀傳統，當男人口交才是真男人! ‘’ Explore three major traditions of gay.

A man becomes a real man when he performs oral sex on his partner.’, fantonghun an zhe lai 反同性戀暗著來! ‘to oppose homosexuals under the counter’. Headlines end

with exclamation marks attract a great deal of public attention, appealing to the public to have empathy with tongzhi. This strategy is a key mechanism for understanding people who have different sexual orientations, allowing them to feel their emotions. It allows people to identify with tongzhi’s need and offer further assistance. In addition, modal verbs express possibility, intention or necessity. Such sentence patterns like buzhun 不准 ’not allow’, buying 不應 ‘should not’, bugai 不該 ‘should not’. Table

4.15 shows five types of strategies identified with specific examples in the news data.

Table 4.15

Five types of strategies used in headlines

modal verbs 不准同 不應怕被指 同志如說 民進黨同 不該為少數

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After headlines analysis, we are preceding to the next stage, analysis of a wider context, news content. Examination of news data has revealed three obvious themes are categorized as equality and sameness, the role of family and destruction to society. The result is supplemented by over 80% data that touches on the three main themes we mentioned. The specific extracts which present in this section could help researchers figure out how homosexuality is represented and in what way they are exactly described in news discourse.

4.3.2.1 Equality and sameness