Diachronic Analysis of Incongruent News Headlines: A Case Study of Inter-Korean Summits

Abstract: This article aims to examine the congruity between news headlines and full news stories and identify changes in the aboutness and style of incongruent news headlines over time. In so doing, it suggests a keyness approach to textual congruity. This case study makes use of the inter-Korean summit corpora, comprising news reports in Chosun ilbo and Hankyoreh shinmun in 2000, 2007, and 2018. The keyness analysis of aboutness reveals that news headlines highlighted individual newspaper's biased view of peace talks in a polarized manner, and discursive changes were more radically represented in the news headlines than the news stories. A stylistic analysis shows that individual newspapers utilize distinctive symbols to increase newsworthiness. Incongruent keywords detected by both aboutness and stylistic analyses indicate an obvious trend toward news headlines functioning as attention-getters despite the differences in communication with their readership. This study demonstrates that a keyness analysis can be applied to measure congruity between texts and that keyword analyses of aboutness and style produce complementary research findings.