Susanne Mühleisen
[Varieties of English Around the World G67] 2022
► pp. 43–76
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.