TENSE SHIFT IN NEWS DISCOURSE: HOW HEADLINES AND BODY TEXTS DIVERGE IN TEMPORAL REFERENCE

Аннотация

Tense shift — the systematic departure from default tense-to-time mappings is a defining feature of news language. Yet existing research has treated news tense largely as a single phenomenon, rarely distinguishing between the radically different grammatical behaviour of headlines and the body texts that follow them. This paper addresses that gap by analysing tense patterns at two structural levels headline and body text across a corpus of 1,000 news items: 500 English-language texts (BBC, CNN) and 500 Uzbek-language texts, published between January 2023 and December 2025. Drawing on data from the authorʼs dissertation on tense transformation in English and Uzbek news discourse, the study demonstrates that headlines and body texts operate under fundamentally different tense regimes in both languages, and that the direction and degree of tense shift diverges sharply between English and Uzbek journalistic traditions. In English, the headline deploys the Historic Present to simulate immediacy, while the body transitions to Past Simple for factual narration, creating a Present→Past tense shift at the text boundary. In Uzbek, the headline uses the Definite Past (–di form) to signal verified fact, while the body may introduce Present Simple for contextualisation, creating an inverse Past→Present pattern. These cross-linguistic asymmetries reflect deeper cultural differences in how journalistic credibility is constructed through grammar.