Cataphoric indexicality of titles

In this paper, some issues related to the complex nature of titles and headlines are handled in connection with the heuristic of information encoding and text processing. This paper is part of a much wider research project, co-funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and the University of Pisa (http://www.humnet.unipi.it/citatal), which aims at arranging linguistic and textual phenomena along a hierarchical scale of complexity. This research project also aims at identifying specific criteria for a theoretically-based definition of complexity. Language and text complexity are generally conceived of as based on syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic motivations, but the notion is still too generic and not always theory-grounded, since it is partly obtained through statistical empirical evidence, and partly mediated by intuition. Complexity differs from a definition of difficulty and the two notions should be kept distinct, at least from a theoretical viewpoint, although they present a strict correlation when information processing and discourse understanding are made relevant. In this approach, interpretability, complexity and markedness are three faces of the same object and their interplay is what this paper will try to illustrate. The specific phenomenon under investigation is the marked status of titles in terms of “phoricity”. Markedness is provisionally intended to be a way to assess its complexity.