The Narrative Text as an Act of Communication

The Pragmatics of Obituary Notices in Malawian Newspapers

“…Using Gasparov's (1977) typology of discourses, we have noted that Malawian obituary notices negotiate both public and private domains. The obituary is a predominantly private affair which, however, uses a public forum for its consummation.…”

“…While a genre is a compositional, intertextual creative resource (also see Briggs and Bauman 1992) discourse type, in which obituaries fit, it is "a recognizable form of communication that has semiotic value within a system of types of communication" (Koester 1995:161). Koester (1995) further uses Gasparov's (1977) typology of discourse types as a basis for analyzing obituaries. Gasparov, using two fundamental features of communication, the addresser and addressee, distinguishes between three types of discourseofficial, practical, and literary.…”

“…It is different from official discourse, however, in that it has an aesthetic intent and, therefore, involves language play. Gasparov's (1977) notion of discourse types has been expanded in various ways by various scholars. Koester (1995), for instance, adds commercial and journalistic discourse types to account for the discourse types that are often encountered in the mass media in western societies.…”

Reviewing the Concept of Advertising from the Print Media Perspectives

“…For example, Ondimu (2014) designed a study that explored the schematic arrangements and the linguistic constituents of newspapers obituary advertisements in Kenya in order to find out how the society observes and conducts itself towards death. In the same vein, Matiki (2001) used the Gasparovian typology (Gasparov, 1977) of discourse to assess the structural and thematic features of newspaper obituaries in Malawi, and how these announcements were contextualized in that multicultural society. In Ghana, Afful (2012) adopted the Swalesian approach (Swales 1990) to genre study to examine the representation of sociocultural code of principles in the Ghanaian death announcements.…”

Social and Temporal Dimensions in Icelandic Obituarial Discourse

“…The notion of discourse type, on the other hand, refers to the semiotic significance of a form of linguistic production in syntagma tic relation to other forms, akin to what is sometimes referred to as "framing of the discourse" (Hanks 1987:672). Gasparov (1977), following Vinokur (1968), distinguished between three great spheres of discourse: official, practical, and literary. Official discourse is public: addressed to "a macro-type audience" (whether in fact the audience is large or not), it includes legal documents, regulations, official news reports, court decisions, and confidential conversations among civil servants who assume their roles as representatives of institutions and so forth.…”