Linguistic, intercultural and semiotic contrasts of obituaries

This paper is a contribution to contrastive textology of media discourse. After linguistic definitions of text type (Textsorte) and bimodal texts (constituted by verbal and non-verbal elements) the text type obituary is characterized as an advertisement in a daily newspaper announcing death of a person – normally before the funeral. The examples are analysed and compared by linguistic and semiotic methods, showing textual, intercultural and semiotic particularities.