A Comparative Study of the Patterns of Present Tense in Headlines in Indian English Newspapers

This paper aims to study the usage of the present tense in the news headlines in the Indian English newspaper. It tries to seek the usage of finite and non-finite sentences and the usage of various tenses across the various Indian English newspapers. For this study, a total of 300 headlines were taken. A set of 75 headlines was randomly taken from the four different newspapers. Of these two newspapers, the New Delhi edition of The Hindu and The Indian Express were taken. The other two Indore edition newspapers, The Times of India and Free Press, were taken. The researcher found that the preferred sentence is finite and the preferred tense is the present tense. Non-finite sentences and other tenses, such as past and future, are used sparingly. New construction of present and past tense combined is also seen in some of the sentences .