Investigating the Ambiguities in the Algerian Newspaper Headlines (Al-Khabar) A Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Study

Abstract

A newspaper headlines is the gateway of news article or story, the writers utilize ambiguity unintentionally or intentionally, this research aims to investigate the ambiguity in Algerian newspaper headlines, focusing on the newspaper Al Khabar. The study adopts a linguistic and psycholinguistic approach to explore the phenomenon of ambiguity in headlines, shedding light on its linguistic types, which play significant roles in headline comprehension, by analyzing a corpus of Al Khabar headlines. Furthermore, combining and analyzing the psycholinguistic data to explore the effects of ambiguity on readers. The study's findings to both linguistic and psycholinguistic research have shown the dominance of pragmatic ambiguity type in AL Khabar newspaper; however, the Algerian readers prefer lexical ambiguity