Communicating messages of solidarity, promotion and pride in death announcements genre in Jordanian newspapers

Abstract

This study examined various manifestations of the obituary announcement genre in Arabic to see what generic structures are common in a variety of death announcements, and what communicative functions are articulated by their generic components. Drawing on a corpus of 200 announcements randomly collected from two Jordanian daily newspapers, I identified two types of obituary announcements; one communicates a normal death, whereas the other celebrates an unusual death, termed a ‘martyr’s wedding’. I identified nine recurrent components in the death announcements, reflecting the sociocultural norms, practices and beliefs that give rise to these two distinct, yet related, communicative events. Despite observed similarities in their generic components and their overall communicative purpose, the ‘martyr’s wedding’ notices were found to incorporate promotion of the deceased and communicate a feeling of pride and honor on the part of the announcer. I hope that the results of this study will be of help in further understanding sociocultutral factors that influence this communicative event and provide greater insight into the relationship between genres as social communicative events.

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