LAS DESCRIPCIONES DEFINIDAS Y LA ORIENTACIÓN DE LA INTERPRETACIÓN EN LOS TITULARES DE PRENSA 1

Definite descriptions are often used in press news to introduce or maintain a certain referent. However, as different Relevance Theoretic-based approaches to definite descriptions have shown (Rouchota, 1992; Scott, 2011; Fretheim, 2012), the contribution of definite description to the overall comprehension process goes beyond the act of guiding the addressee to recover the mental representation of a certain individual. This article deals with referential uses of definite descriptions in political news headlines and explains how the so-called "conceptual meaning" of a description contributes to the different subtasks of the relevance-theoretic comprehension process (Wilson y Sperber, 2004): a) to the construction of an appropriate hypothesis about explicit content; b) to the construction of an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual assumptions, and c) to the construction of an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual implications. The study defends that referential uses of definite descriptions in news headlines lead the readers to focus their attention on some properties of an individual -- the ones outlined by the descriptive content -- rather than on the individual itself. Following Bezuidenhout (2013), the "role occupier" is pushed into the background in comparison to the prominence the "role-property" acquires, since a global interpretation that satisfies relevance expectations requires such information hierarchy.