A Genre Analysis of a Non-Academic Genre: The Obituary

Abstract

This paper presents a genre analysis of the contemporary obituary. Following a literary review, a mixed methods approach is employed to analyse a sample of obituaries of the same deceased person but from a variety of UK sources. The intention is to carry out a pilot project to explore the possibilities of some analysis techniques for genre description. Bhatia’s (1993) seven steps for genre analysis are employed with special attention given to step 6, the analysis of the texts for discourse patterns. For this step corpus tools are employed to identify discourse patterns that characterise the sample texts and that could potentially indicate markers for obituary genre characterisation. This method has been employed both to investigate differences between the texts in the sample and also to identify common characteristics among the sample texts that could potentially distinguish the obituary genre from other genres. The texts are analysed for lexical density, readability, clause complexity, phrase complexity, and syntactic sophistication, among other things. Then a qualitative analysis is carried out to investigate the wider discourse aspects of the genre, also considering multimodal aspects of the contemporary obituary genre. The findings contribute to the knowledge of the discourse patterns of the obituary genre and could be replicated in further research activity to increase the reliability and generalisability of the findings, as well as furthering knowledge of discourse distinctions between different genres.