You won't believe what's in this paper! Clickbait, relevance and the curiosity gap

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