Context and goals: Suicide notes from a linguistic point of view

ABSTRACT

The article is a critique of a study of language of suicide notes. It raises the issue of the acontextual approach to language and suggests that suicide notes and their language must be seen within the social context in which they are written. Moreover, the article challenges the assumption that suicide notes have only a representational function. Instead, it argues that they can serve a host of other communicative purposes.

This article refers to:

A comparison of suicide notes written by men and women

Notes

¹These are translations of Polish originals. They were taken from the Polish Corpus of Farewell Letters (http://www.pcsn.uni.wroc.pl/). See also Zasko-Zielinska (2013).