“Pleasing the deceased”: expressive speech acts in spouse and children-authored funeral tributes

Although homely discourses, particularly funeral discourse, have attracted increasing scholarly attention, expressive speech acts (ESAs) in funeral tributes remain underexplored, especially in African sociocultural contexts. This study thus examines how bereaved spouses and children in Ghana employ ESAs in funeral tributes to express grief and construct relational identities. Specifically, it examines the types of ESAs used and the similarities and differences in their distribution across spouse- and child-authored tributes. The dataset comprises 104 funeral tributes purposively selected from Ghanaian funeral brochures to ensure representation of the two principal familial categories most intimately connected to the deceased. The study employs a qualitative discourse-pragmatic approach, complemented by simple quantitative frequency counts used solely to indicate distributional patterns, rather than for statistical generalization. Guided by Searle’s (1969) speech act framework, the analysis reveals that both spouses and children employ ESAs to articulate gratitude, grief, loneliness and nostalgia, consolation, admiration, love, wishes, and farewell, though with notable quantitative variations between the two groups. These expressive patterns reflect culturally embedded ways of negotiating loss, sustaining kinship bonds, and reaffirming family identity within Ghanaian funeral practices. The study advances scholarship on expressive speech acts and extends research on homely discourses by foregrounding funeral tributes as significant sites of emotional performance and African identity construction.