Semantic Features of Colon Structure in Newspaper Headlines

The article, through an analysis of semantic features of all the 2160 colon structures in headlines which appeared in People's Daily in 2006, from the quantitative statistics and describtion to the qualitative analysis, summes up the semantic relationship of the two parts joined by colon.We argue that there exist between the two parts joined by colon such semantic relations as statement-object, topic-statement, statement-detail, event-consequence, argument-evidence, inference, supplement, cause-effect and purpose.