Powerful and Powerless: Obituary Notices as a Means of Identifying Group Membership

Critical discourse analysis is used as a theoretical framework to examine the contents & the prevailing rhetorical styles of obituaries appearing in two national newspapers in Venezuela in the years 1997/98. It is hypothesized that the press discourse of the genre of obituary is converted into a social-ideological vehicle that, instead of being centered on the condolences for the deceased, serves to demonstrate, reinforce, & legitimate the relationships of power & influence of the members of a social group. A total of 303 obituary notices comprised the corpus for this study. 6 Tables, 1 Appendix, 16 References. Adapted from the source document