The discursive building of the brazilian obituary in the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper

Abstract

This paper presents the analysis results of 2.284 obituaries published in the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper between 2007 and 2012. The goal is to recognize the stylistic, thematic, and compositional characteristics of the discourse genre, considering such characteristics within the Journalistic Categories’ framework from Costa (2010) and Marques de Mello (2010), under the discursive perspective of Bakhtin (2011) and Maingueneau (2013). To accomplish that, results obtained from two methodological procedures were used in order to present, quantitatively and qualitatively, the stabilization of stylistic, thematic, and compositional elements of this specific speech genre and its relation to New Journalism. The investigation pointed out the Brazilian obituary presents elements that confirm the hypothesis of this speech genre as an informative and utilitarian journalism genre that uses New Journalism as a stylistic resource in order to soften the mourning of someone’s death by celebrating the person’s life.