The research further depicts that certain lexical items have been used as euphemisms to substitute the unpleasant and offensive concept of death using polite expressions. In all cases, the lexical items used are meant to comfort the bereaved and eulogize or praise the deceased. Death is not only presented as repose, a journey and a reward to the deceased, but also as a loss to the family of the deceased. Those lexical choices contribute to the meaning making process in obituaries by depicting death as a normal occurrence in a person’s life that should be accepted and appreciated, at times a calamity or misfortune. The study revealed that ordinary words (lexical items) can be used in the context of the obituary text to render new meanings. Data was qualitatively analyzed by examining the lexical items of nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives used to aid in the interpretation of obituaries basing on Halliday’s theory of systemic functional linguistics.

Corpus compilation was used to capture the use of lexical items in the obituaries. From these, a corpus of twenty purposively sampled obituary texts from the Daily Nation newspaper were used to generate data for analysis and discussion. The study entailed a library based research where total populations of two hundred obituaries were collected for a period of one and a half weeks. A descriptive research design was applied which accurately described phenomena through the narrative type, descriptions and classifications. Halliday’s (1985) theory of systemic functional linguistics was adopted for this study where ideational, interpersonal and the textual metafunctions of language were used, incorporating transitivity which deals with how meaning is interpreted and how the process transmits ideas. The objectives of this study are to: describe how the lexical choices contribute to the meaning making process in obituaries and explore how transitivity processes aid in their informative purpose of obituaries where death is viewed as a material or mental process. The purpose of this study is to examine the obituary as a form of advertisement whose functional language is carried out through praising, euphemistic and consolatory devices. Their avoidance to speak freely about human mortality may be making obituary writers to resort to a variety of linguistic 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. Man has traditionally avoided talking about the subject of death using explicit terms. Embassy in Nairobi, which killed more than 200 people.Īssociated Press reporters Jason Straziuso, Rodney Muhumuza, Ben Curtis, Adam Schreck and Jacob Kushner in Nairobi, Kenya, Cassandra Vinograd in London, and Abdi Guled in Mogadishu, Somalia, contributed to this report.Death has been argued to be a “fear-based taboo” in which different fears co-exist namely fear of the loss of loved ones, fear of corruption of the body, fear of evil spirits and fear of what comes with death. The attack at the Westgate mall in Nairobi’s Westlands neighborhood was the deadliest terrorist attack in Kenya since the 1998 al-Qaida truck bombing of the U.S.

Nearly 200 people were wounded, including five Americans. The militants specifically targeted non-Muslims, and at least 18 foreigners were among the dead, including six Britons, as well as citizens from France, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Peru, India, Ghana, South Africa and China.

The attack began on Saturday when some 12 to 15 al-Shabab militants invaded the mall, wielding grenades and firing on civilians inside the complex, which includes shops for Nike, Adidas and Bose and is popular with foreigners and wealthy Kenyans. So these are just baseless rumours that have no substance,” said the al-Shabab press office in what is thought to be an authentic email address. “We have an adequate number of young men who fully committed and ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of Allah and for the sake of their religion, so there is no need for us to employ our sisters in the battlefield and thereby expose them to unnecessary risk.

Daily nation kenya orbituaries