Generic and Socio-Cultural Patterns of Death Announcements in Iraqi Newspapers

Abstract

The present paper examines the genre of death notices in Iraqi newspapers in terms of its schematic and socio-cultural structure. Adopting Swales' [1990] rhetorical approach to genre analysis, the study has examined a corpus of 150 death texts taken from three local Iraqi newspapers. The genre analysis has identified eleven component moves, four of which are obligatory and seven are optional. In addition, the generic structure together with the lexico-grammatical features reflect the socio-cultural norms and assumptions that Iraqi Arabic speakers live by.