Lexical Choices and Meaning Making Process in Selected Daily Nation Newspaper Obituaries

Death has been argued to be a “fear based” taboo in which different fears co-exist; fear of the loss of loved ones, fear of corruption of the body, fear of the evil spirits and fear of what comes with death. Man has traditionally avoided talking about the subject of death in explicit terms. The avoidance to speak freely about human mortality makes obituary writers to resort to a variety of lexical devices in order to compliment the departed and show respect to those left alive, satisfying in a way both the social and religious impositions traditionally associated with human mortality. The purpose of this paper is to examine the obituary as a form of advertisement whose functional language is carried out through praise, euphemistic and consolatory devices. The objective of this paper is to describe how the lexical choices contribute to the meaning making process in obituaries. Halliday’s (1985) theory of systemic functional linguistics was adopted in the exploration of this paper where the ideational metafunction of language were used. A descriptive study design was applied which accurately described phenomena through the narrative type, descriptions and classifications. Library research was used to purposively sample obituary texts from the Daily Nation newspaper to generate data for this discussion. Corpus compilation was used to capture the use of lexical items in obituaries. Data was qualitatively analyzed by examining the lexical items of nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives that aid in the interpretation of obituary texts. This study revealed that ordinary words can be used in the context of the obituary text to render new meanings. The lexical items contribute to the meaning making process by depicting death as a normal occurrence in life that should be accepted and appreciated, at times a calamity or misfortune. Death is not only presented as repose, a journey or a reward to the deceased but also a loss to the family of the deceased. The lexical items are meant to comfort the bereaved and praise the deceased. This study further reveals that certain lexical items have been used as euphemisms to substitute the unpleasant and offensive concept of death.