31 December 2012

New Quarry Norms

The modern-day extra-long noun-phrase build-up phenomenon for newspaper headlines has been observed for articles in English (see here). Sometimes, these long noun phrases are rather hard to parse, and they can give rise to what we call 'crash blossoms'.

This style of writing newspaper headlines also occurs in Brunei. Here is the headline from page 1 of The Brunei Times of Sunday, 30 December 2012:

The verb appears to be eye, and the article is about new norms for quarries. (It could, of course, be about norms for new quarries; but it appears to be the other interpretation.)

I find such headlines hard to parse, so I don't understand why journalists use them so often.