This text-linguistic study looks at death notices in the Births, Marriages and Deaths columns of daily newspapers in German-speaking Switzerland using an action theory-based descriptive model covering situative conditions of action (action context), non-verbal features, nature and sequence of variety-specific actions (action structure) and actual wording of individual action stages (wording structure/conventionalised style). With its copious documentary material the study provides insights into form, subject matter, language and function of conventional and unconventional death notices in German-speaking Switzerland, taking due account of differences specific to individual regions or newspapers.