In the literature, extensive attention is given to the content, structure, and style of obituaries in newspapers. Analyses of the demise of colleagues in internal business communications are however nonexistent. This article discusses a bottom-up analysis of 150 obituaries published in Flemish staff magazines--obituaries that mostly focus on the deceased's career and professional qualities. Following analysis, the data were divided in obituaries that are continuous texts and obituaries with a letter format. The differences between the two types lie at different levels: format, content, structure, and language use. Obituaries with a letter format are characterized and determined by three paradoxes: the sender-receiver paradox, life-death paradox, and happiness-sadness paradox.

Linguistic analysis can help medical professionals to better understand their communicative skills, styles, and approach to patients in end-of-life situations. We have shown how linguistic analysis can contribute to a better understanding of physician-patient interaction. Moreover, we have illustrated the usefulness of interdisciplinary research in the medical domain.

Despite the increasing incidence of the condition, people with dementia face a double stigma: ageism and the stigma of mental illness. The stigmatization of the condition has negative consequences, and can even lead to self-stigmatization. To develop adequate education programs to overcome the harmful stigma, the degree and the characteristics of that stigmatization have to be identified. In this study, the content and the language of obituaries of well-known people with dementia are analyzed using a qualitative bottom-up approach. If mentioned, the dementia receives little attention and the information given does not exceed common knowledge. Euphemistic language such as metaphors is introduced not to circumvent the condition, but to palliate its degressive nature.

In studies of political communication the use of personal pronouns is often put forward as one of the strategies for influencing sender-receiver relations (e.g., De Fina [1], Haverkate [2], Zupnik [3]). As Rogers and Swales [4] among others have demonstrated, similar techniques can be detected in corporate communication. In this article, the use of French and Dutch personal and possessive pronouns in the first person plural is examined in internal communication documents. The focus is on the link between text types and the use of inclusive, exclusive, or ambiguous we. First the research material is described; then a concise overview of the literary sources is given; finally the results of the research are discussed. It will be demonstrated that managers can exploit personal pronouns strategically and that the use of we is a parameter for identifying text function.

Silke Creten is working on a PhD in linguistics at KU Leuven. In her research project, she looks into communication about dementia and communication with people living with dementia in Flanders, with an emphasis on the stigma surrounding the condition. Her research interests

Combined use of u and je in employment advertisements: On the grammatical and cultural context of forms of addressThis paper concerns the use of forms of address, especially the second-person pronouns je and u, in employment advertisements in the Netherlands and Flanders. An innovative aspect of our study is that we created a corpus of advertisements in which a special property is that there is a combined use of u-forms and je-forms. Among other things, this makes it possible to find out why authors use a u-form, even though familiar forms of address are used elsewhere in the text. Our study elaborates on research by Vismans (2007), who focusses on forms of address in job advertisements for highly-educated persons. Our corpus, however, is not restricted to advertisements aimed at highly-educated candidates and our method is not based on identifications of whole advertisement texts in terms of very general patterns (as done in earlier research), but we focus on individual occurrences of pronouns. Our goal is to show the combined action of two relevant factors playing a role in the use of forms of address: (1) the differences between the Netherlands and Flanders in terms of cultural values and (2) the syntactic function (subject or non-subject) of the constituent in which the form occurs. We conclude that forms of address are not only determined by cultural factors, but that the choice of a certain form can reflect Flemish dialect and colloquial varieties, in which a u-form exists which is the non-subject-form of ge/gij. The results show that when we compare the use of pronouns in subject and non-subject functions, there is a preference for u-forms to be used in non-subject functions. An unexpected result is that a similar pattern is found in material from the Netherlands. This can be related to the historical paradigm (as described by Vermaas 2005), in which u was only used in non-subject functions in Netherlandic Dutch as well.

In literature, obituaries from different cultures and languages have been studied on different levels and from different perspectives. One of the popular research topics is the use of metaphors, since metaphors help to cope with death, which in modern society is still a taboo. This article presents a bottom-up, primarily qualitative analysis of the metaphors in 150 obituaries of sportspeople, published in online versions of newspapers/magazines and on the Internet. As expected, the obituaries contain the traditional metaphors of death. Also more original, creative metaphors are introduced to describe death in a euphemistic way. Some of those have a link to sports but not systematically to the sport practiced by the deceased.

The ambiguity of the we-referent in internal communication documents can make text interpretation difficult. We analyzed the 1999 issues of the ’Maxi Guide’, the weekly top-down briefing of a large Belgian distribution chain. In relational and hybrid texts in particular, the referent of the pronoun often changes within the same text without any textual or graphic indicator.This article will first describe how the use of we is avoided. In total seven strategies were detected (e.g., perspective changes, non-finite clauses, elliptical sentences). They will be explained and illustrated with examples translated from both French and Dutch. Next, the article will outline how we itself operates as an evasive strategy. The examples will demonstrate how similar strategies are used in the two languages.