Ageing Discourse in the News: A Corpus-Assisted Study

With older people being the fastest growing segment of the world population, the issue of ageing is of significant and mounting concern to global society and has become a popular and newsworthy topic for the media. This work presents a corpus-assisted analysis of how the notion of ‘ageing’ is construed in the UK press. It combines techniques from corpus linguistics with (critical) discourse studies to analyse a large corpus of newspaper articles (30 million words) representing ten years of ageing coverage. Evidence is provided for predominant representations of ageing and older-age identities which express a society’s world views and value systems, implying rules and standards of conduct.