Kinship and Social Titles in Death Announcements: A Case Study in Tabriz

Titles, kinship terms and nicknames are supplementary words that are voluntarily inserted next to the individuals’ names and are often used to pay tribute and show the kinship relation or social status of the person. The purpose of this study is to investigate the social titles, kinship terms as well as nicknames in 424 condolence letters collected from different areas in Tabriz, Iran. This paper reports a descriptive-analytical study. Findings indicate that there are many differences between using kinship terms and social titles as far as the gender of individuals are concerned. According to the findings, the frequency of social titles in the group of men (2781) is much higher than the frequency in that of women (328), which emphasizes the importance of the social roles attached to men in the genre under study. On the other hand, the number of kinship titles for women is higher, both in terms of type (51 cases) and in terms of frequency (1599), which in fact compensates for the limitation of titles and social titles for women. Regarding the reference to job titles such as "doctor" and "engineer", the frequency of job titles is higher in men corpus