Discourse Deixis in Vietnamese Online News Headlines: Pragmatic Strategies and Ethical Implications

The proliferation of digital news platforms and engagement-driven algorithms has fundamentally restructured standard journalistic routines. Consequently, the rapid influx of information and intense competition for audience attention have transformed news headlines from simple summary labels into strategic discourse products. This study investigates the pragmatic deployment and functions of discourse deixis in modern Vietnamese online news headlines. Focusing on how deictic signals operate as cognitive guidance tools and triggers for reader curiosity, the research examines the functional balance between communicative engagement and journalistic ethics. Adopted within a framework of corpus-assisted discourse-pragmatic analysis supplemented by descriptive statistics, the study analyzed a corpus of 300 online headlines sampled across four major Vietnamese news outlets (VnExpress, Tuoi Tre Online, Dan Tri, Znews) published between 2024 and 2026.

The findings indicate that forward-pointing cataphora relying on masked referents constitutes the most prevalent strategy (42.3%, n=127), followed by interrogative framing (28.0%, n=84), direct address structures (15.3%, n=46), and dramatized temporal/spatial deixis (14.3%, n=43). While these strategies appear pragmatically designed to induce curiosity and lower friction for audience attention, the excessive reliance on artificial information gaps presents notable ethical challenges, including potential user deception and long-term public trust erosion. The study proposes a conceptual model of headline curiosity-gap construction alongside editorial principles, such as “Cognitive Balance” and “Transparent Deixis,” to inform responsible headline composition in digital newsrooms.