Online elaboration of mourning is a kind of techno-spiritual practice, one typical area of which involves communication with the deceased and postmortal profile management via community pages.
This paper surveys the international literature on the connection between elaboration of mourning
and community pages and compares its results with posts and comments having to do with the topic
of death and appearing in Hungarian on Facebook. This corpus-based study confirms the claims
concerning messages of that type in English-language community pages. Along with the obvious
emotive function, mourning texts occurring in social media may fulfil referential (information on
the funeral, circumstances of death), appellative (notification, sale of the deceased's objects), phatic
(condolence, last farewell to and/or continuous contact with the deceased, especially in connection
with holiday seasons), metacommunicative (the issue of the adequacy of online mourning) and
aesthetic functions (quotations from poems or prose; pictures, montages, presentations concerning
topics of the elaboration of mourning). With respect to the phatic function, we also cover the issue
of legitimacy/illegitimacy of mourning (death tourism, trolls). In connection with the appellative
function, we discuss cases in which message senders utilise increased attention caused by someone's death for purposes of marketing. We present types of unique messages in terms of quotations, formulaic situational sentences and individualised texts. The occurrence of religious themes is relatively infrequent in the digital corpus studied here. A special Facebook feature is 'Like' that, in this context, means a special manifestation of sympathy and commemoration rather than the fact that the
reader is pleased by the contents of a message.

Keywords: digital communication, online mourning, elaboration of mourning, online grief