Scott, Kate (2021) You won't believe what's in this paper! Clickbait, relevance, and the curiosity gap. Journal of Pragmatics, 175, pp. 53-66. ISSN (print) 0378-2166
Abstract
Drawing on a corpus of clickbait headlines (Chakraborty, 2016) and using ideas from the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95), this paper examines some of the ways in which writers of clickbait headlines arouse the curiosity of their readers by creating an “information gap” (Loewenstein, 1994). Comparative corpus analysis is combined with close analysis of illustrative examples to explore the contribution that particular parts-of-speech make to the creation of successful clickbait. I focus on two main categories that are overrepresented in clickbait headlines to a statistically significant degree: (i) definite referring expressions and (ii) superlatives and intensifiers. The results and analysis reveal that these parts-of-speech contribute to an information gap by encouraging readers to construct new conceptual files based on the terms used in the headline, while providing little or no content for those files. This then drives the reader to click on the associated link with the expectation that the article will contain relevant information with which he can enhance his conceptual files, and that this, in turn, will reward him with cognitive effects.
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