Abstract:

Previous study on the titles of general academic English research papers has shown that two-part titles are frequently used in such papers This paper endeavors to explore how these titles are used in the titles of research papers on English pragmatics Firstly, an exhaustive classification and statistics of 1212 titles selected from the Journal of Pragmatics published from 1995 to 2009 After all these titles are examined, it is first found that synchronically the structure of the two-item titles in question is simplified (the two items are separated by punctuations such as colon and semicolon, or just aligned together without any punctuation) Secondly, the grammatical forms of the titles tend to be simplified (most of the titles consist of juxtaposed phrases while only a tiny proportion of them comprise full sentences) Diachronically, the proportion of two-item titles is shown to be increasing steadily over the years

Key words: English pragmatics, paper titles, Journal of Pragmatics