On one hand, this thesis aims to summarize a few kinds of rhetoric devices which are frequently used in previous sport news headlines. On the other hand, this thesis aims to compare those headlines written by previous media vertically and horizontally and tries to find out specific features of each kind of sport headlines. At last, this thesis aims to unearth connotations reflected by rhetoric devices in sport news headlines.
2    Literature Review
As ordinary people’s living standards have improved greatly and the concept of national fitness has spread widely, the demand of high quality sports news improves correspondingly. People watch sports programs and news shows through various modern media such as newspaper, radio, television, and the Internet. To stand out in the harsh competition, on one hand, all news media try to bring forth new ideas into the contents of their news. On the other hand, they also try to incorporate new ideas into the forms of their news. Regardless of its contents, whether a piece of news can draw readers’ or viewers’ or not, it greatly depends on its rhetoric devices. In another word, they need to use different kinds of rhetoric devices to make the sentences of their news more precise, vivid and concise. As the epitome of the whole news, the news headlines use rhetoric more frequently to draw readers’ attention. However, researches on rhetoric devices used in sport news headlines are very few. It is very important to do more researches on sport headlines with theories of rhetoric, journalism and cultural linguistics and unearth cultural connotations reflected by rhetoric devices in sport news headlines.
 In China, many scholars talked a lot about skills of sports new headlines translation, few of them talked about rhetoric devices in news headlines. Previous studies on news headlines mainly belong to journalism works, and paragraphs about news headlines just appear in some chapters of those works, and works that wholly focus on news headlines are too rare to be found, not to say works written with linguistic theories.
Some scholars researched on a specific rhetoric device. For example, Qiu(2015) talked about conceptual metaphors in her work A Cognitive Study on Conceptual Metaphors in English News Headlines. And Yang(2006) cited some examples and analyzed how news media write headlines when a team loses its games and how when a team wins its games vertically, but she did not cite examples of different sports, such as basketball and football, and did not analyze how football media write their headlines and how basketball write their headlines horizontally. And Xu(2012) talked about features of English news headlines from a stylistic perspective. All works I mentioned above are of good value, but they are not integrated and lacking of deepness. 体育新闻标题中修辞手法运用的分析(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_47743.html