Mourning for Companion Animals in Digital Space: A Discursive Framework of Pathemisation

With the development of digital discourses related to animal death, such as support groups and commemorative portals, mourning for nonhuman companions becomes a more and more commonly observed sociolinguistic phenomenon. The present article is a case study of the French-language commemorative website called Amonami. The analysis, rooted in French linguistic discourse theory, is focused on the issue of pathemisation. It aims to describe how discursive factors influence expressing emotional states after losing beloved animals and to characterise linguistic means used by animal owners in this context. The study presents the scenography of the portal as a framework for enunciations, called homages (French: hommage), published on the website. The analysis also indicates the presence of various linguistic means of pathemic expression in the studied enunciations, such as metaphors, axiologically marked vocabulary, affectonymes and agentive expressions.