Exploring Socio-cultural Perspective and Stance in Obituary Emails: A genre-based study

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring socio-cultural stance and perspective in writing practices for condolence emails. The social purpose of condolence emails is to express deep sadness on the passing souls. Therefore, such texts note life stories and commemorate inspirations of the deceased both famous and infamous so account for the genre analysis (Christie & Martin, 1997). Since personal emails are written by the individuals concerned so necessarily outline significant cultural elements. The study builds on the topological genre analysis (James R Martin & Rose, 2008) of the condolence emails mainly looking into staging (sequential and ascriptional) and describing linguistic features (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). The analysis shows significant socio-cultural variations in writing condolence emails. Therefore, genre features of the selected texts reveal that differences in perspectives and stance in constructing such texts are mainly attributes of the socio-cultural distinction’s peculiar to different dominant cultures. For example, texts from the European cultures highlight the deceased’s professional achievements then services to the wider community; while emails from the Asian cultures construe interpersonal relationships in the orientation stage then append personal attributes of the deceased followed by the professional services rendered to a wider SFL community. The classified data is obtained from the sys-func and sysfling mailing list archives and has been anonymized to secrete identity.