Drawing on a corpus of clickbait headlines (Chakraborty et al., 2016) and using ideas from the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95), this paper examines some of the ways in which writers of clickbait headlines arouse the curiosity of their readers by creating an “information gap” (Loewenstein, 1994). Comparative corpus analysis is combined with close analysis of illustrative examples to explore the contribution that particular parts-of-speech make to the creation of successful clickbait. I focus on two main categories that are overrepresented in clickbait headlines to a statistically significant degree: (i) definite referring expressions and (ii) superlatives and intensifiers. The results and analysis reveal that these parts-of-speech contribute to an information gap by encouraging readers to construct new conceptual files based on the terms used in the headline, while providing little or no content for those files. This then drives the reader to click on the associated link with the expectation that the article will contain relevant information with which he can enhance his conceptual files, and that this, in turn, will reward him with cognitive effects.

本文利用Clickbait标题的语料库（Chakraborty et al。，2016）并运用了相关理论实用主义框架中的思想（Sperber and Wilson，1986/95），研究了Clickbait标题的作者引起人们注意的一些方式。通过创造“信息鸿沟”来吸引读者的好奇心（Loewenstein，1994）。比较语料库分析与示例性示例的紧密分析相结合，以探索特定词类对成功创建点击诱饵的贡献。我主要关注Clickbait头条中统计意义上过高的两个主要类别：（i）确定的引用表达和（ii）最高级和最高级。结果和分析表明，这些词性通过鼓励读者根据标题中使用的术语构建新的概念性文件，而为这些文件提供的内容很少或根本没有内容，从而加剧了信息鸿沟。然后，这驱使读者单击关联的链接，期望该文章将包含相关信息，以使他可以增强其概念文件，从而使他获得认知效果。