Application of conceptual blending theory in the analysis of economic, political and sports news headlines

Conceptual blending is a creative application to explain concepts that go beyond simply combining structures and raw data. The present article tries to examine its effectiveness in news headlines of newspapers in different genres by referring to the theory of conceptual blending. For this purpose, 1000 news headlines from the Donyaye Eghtesad newspaper in the economic genre, 1000 news headlines from the Ebtekar newspaper in the political genre, as well as 1000 headlines from the Hadaf Varzeshi newspaper have been examined. The headlines with conceptual blending were identified in them and also their type and number were explained and drawn by drawing a grid. Out of 1000 news headlines examined in each genre, 240 in the economic genre, 160 in the political headline and 80 in the sports headline are in line with the theory of blending. According to the results, it seems that due to the intertwining of people's daily lives with the economy, the use of blending in the economic genre is more than the other two genres, and among the blending types, the single-scope type has a higher frequency than the other types in all three genres. Double-scope type blending has been observed due to its more complex structure than the lower frequency single-scope blending. It was also found that simple type blending has very low frequencies in all three genres. In the study of news headlines, due to the association-orientation mechanism of the type of mirrors, there are very few of them in each genre.