Dissecting Linguistic Devices in Khasi Newspaper Headlines: A Semantic and Lexico-Grammatical Analysis

This paper offers a comprehensive linguistic analysis of 80 Khasi newspaper headlines collected from six prominent newspapers across diverse thematic areas, including politics, administration, environment, sports, and culture, during May to July 2025. Utilizing Montgomery’s (2007) model, the study investigates both semantic and lexico-grammatical features to reveal how Khasi journalistic language skillfully balances brevity, clarity, and cultural nuance. The semantic analysis centers on the triadic elements of persons, events, and circumstances, uncovering a strong emphasis on event-driven constructions with frequent explicit references to agents such as government bodies, community groups, and key individuals. In contrast, circumstantial information, such as time and place, is comparatively sparse, often omitted to maintain headline economy and stimulate active reader participation through a culturally embedded notion of “tactical incompleteness.” Lexico-grammatical examination demonstrates widespread use of ellipsis and syntactic compression, where auxiliary verbs and agents are left out when contextually inferable, alongside prevalent nominalization that encapsulates complex processes and evaluations into compact noun forms, enhancing informational density. The analysis also finds frequent employment of non-finite verb constructions to express purpose or intent, while the crucial role of classifiers in Khasi grammar ensures precise clarity concerning number, gender, and animacy. Strategic use of tense and aspect markers provides temporal nuances, and selective code-mixing with English, mainly for technical terminology and proper nouns, reflects a thoughtful negotiation between preserving linguistic identity and embracing modern influences. Collectively, these findings portray Khasi newspaper headlines as sophisticated linguistic artifacts that integrate global journalistic conventions with local grammatical and cultural imperatives, thereby offering important contributions to media linguistics in minority language contexts. This research invites further inquiry into minority language media and highlights the broader applicability of Montgomery’s model beyond dominant world languages.