Register variation and distributional patterns in article omission in Dutch headlines

This paper presents a corpus study of article omission in newspaper headlines. The corpus consists of material from a variety of Dutch and Flemish newspapers. The most important factor influencing the frequency of article omission in headlines is the journalistic genre in which it occurs. The main focus of the study is on the semantic and syntactic distribution of the phenomenon, on the basis of which a case will be made for its description as a manifestation of the more widespread decline of the article in Dutch and not as a phenomenon motivated solely by pragmatic factors.