Chapter 3
Personhood, genealogy and remembrance in death notices and obituaries
Death and bereavement as fundamental human experiences are expressed in culturally diverse verbal and non-verbal acts of mourning. Death notices are public announcements which can be found in newspapers (print and, more recently, also in online versions of newspapers) as part of the classified advertisements. These are distinguished here from obituaries as forms of life narrative of persons of public significance. This chapter will first explore the macro-structural and micro-linguistic features of death announcements from a comparative perspective. A corpus of ca. 250 death notices from the Trinidad Guardian newspaper and other sources will then be analysed in order to explore particular features of the genre in the Caribbean context. Special attention will be given to the use of nicknames (“a.k.a,” “also known as …,” or “better known as …”) and personhood in Trinidadian death notices. Furthermore, a comparative qualitative analysis of obituaries for Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott will also investigate narrative structure and evaluative speech acts in that genre.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Last rites – linguistic and other acts of mourning
- 2.Death notices around the world: Formal and functional features of a genre
- 2.1The form and functions of death notices
- 2.2Comparative structural features in death announcements: On cultural and linguistic versions of the text format
- 3.Death notices in Trinidad: A corpus-based analysis of classified newspaper ads
- 3.1Grandfather of 17: Positional identity, kinship and genealogy in remembrance
- 3.2Taboo and euphemisms in the language of Trinidad death notices
- 3.3“Better known as…”: Nicknames and personhood in Trinidad
- 3.4Trinidadian death notices across time and media
- 4.The starved eye closes: Obituaries as life narrative and praise song
- 5.Beyond print media: Transitions in digital and audio-visual media
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Notes