INTRODUCTION

Newspaper obituaries and death notices occupy a special place in societies and cultures around the globe: they are perhaps the most frequently read section of any daily newspaper, and for many a reader the obituary page is the first page he or she engrosses in. They note the passing of relatives, friends, colleagues, acquaintances; they recount the life stories of people of power, celebrities – and ordinary people as well. The famous are celebrated on the first pages by obituaries written by newspaper staff (usually professional obituarists); however, it is the lives of common people that are publicly chronicled and commemorated in death notices (or death announcements, as they are sometimes referred to) – texts that take the form of paid announcements, written by relatives, friends, colleagues, or other members of society that want to commemorate the deceased, and published in the “Deaths” or “In Memoriam” section of a local or national newspaper.

In Britain and the U.S.A. obituaries and, to a lesser extent, death notices have been a subject of sociological, historical and cultural research as they record people's lives, their achievements and virtues, and can be regarded as a valuable source of data, allowing researchers to observe the changes of post-death rituals and customs, explore the evolution of people's attitudes to death and the dead (Ariès 1989; Vovelle 2008), examine what values and virtues society wants to remember and appraise (Hume 2000; Fowler 2007), or investigate the treatment of the dead in the press (Ferguson 1999; Starck 2006). Recent linguistic research on British and American obituaries and death notices concentrates on their history: the evolution of both genres in the early British press (Fries 1990, 2006), euphemistic language of Victorian obituaries (Fernández 2006, 2007), changing manner of presenting death in The New York Times in the 20th century (Phillips 2007), as well as their modern aspects: structuring information in American obituaries (Moses and Marelli 2004), presenting lives of the deceased (Bytheway and Johnson 1996), presentation of women (Eid 2002; Wawrzyczek 2012), structure of Canadian death notices (McNeil 2005), structure and language of online death notices published in The New York Times (Cebrat 2016), axiological aspects and valuation of the deceased in British obituaries (Włodarski 2016).