Ambiguity in newspaper headlines have been studied by many people, which mostly focuses upon the traditional linguistics perspective: lexical, grammatical and syntactical. In this paper, the author intends to study the ambiguity in newspaper headlines from the cognitive perspective in order to find how people perceive the ambiguous headlines. To support the analysis, many examples of ambiguous headlines are collected to investigate into way people perceive them. Finally, the author concluded that in the cognitive perspective, people are prone to accept one of the two or more interpretations about the ambiguous headlines according to the following factors: their back ground knowledge, the common sense, the social-cultural environment as well as their personal altitudes, which are drawn upon from the image schema theory.
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