Drawing on a corpus of 100 randomly collected death notices published in an Iranian national newspaper, this study examined generic structures as well as their lexico-grammatical patterning to reveal what communicative functions are articulated by these generic components. The authors identified 12 rhetorical moves in the corpus. They illustrated that these recurrent rhetorical moves reflect the Iranian sociocultural norms, as well as social and religious beliefs. Also, the study pointed to a multimodality perspective on textual analysis as it rejected the idea that linguistic items are the only meaning-making devices.