This study analyses morphosyntactic features of selected online newspaper headlines from three Nigerian national dailies: The Nation Newspaper, Premium Times, and Daily Post. The study adopts Distributed Morphology Theory as its analytical framework. Findings reveal characteristic features of newspaper headlines, including the use of simple present tense instead of present perfect tense to describe recent news, intransitive use of generally transitive verbs, and omission of auxiliaries in verbal headlines. The study concludes that omitted close-class grammatical categories have low information value and are understood from context.
