Late Modern English death notices

Death notices are traditional texts that have become conventionalised within a certain speech community. They use highly standardised expressions and established structural patterns to fulfil the function of informing about an individual’s death. This paper traces the development and linguistic realisation of this text type throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of a diachronic corpus, the Corpus of English Death Notices (CEDN), which consists of 400 death notices published between 1801 and 2012 in four English newspapers (The Morning Chronicle, The Daily News, The Times, and The Guardian). The pre-set macrostructure of the text type can be described in terms of a template consisting of thirteen different structural elements. The analysis of the text samples shows that many of these structural elements display social and cultural norms and conventions. Ten of the elements can already be found at the beginning of the 19th century; a further three elements start to appear within the period of investigation, adding new communicative functions to the texts. Based on their frequency of occurrence, they can be categorised as obligatory or optional elements of the text type. The diachronic investigation shows that some of these components remain stable whereas others change status. As regards their linguistic realisation, tendencies towards greater precision, e.g. when mentioning the date of death, as well as tendencies towards more vague expressions, e.g. when referring to the circumstances of the death, can be observed.