The book explores the role of age in communication under consideration of various age groups, genres, cultures and languages, and demonstrates the growing potential of age-related research for linguistic and social analyses that is founded on a more comprehensive and systematic basis than has been practiced so far. The volume establishes a point of contact with the work of Coupland, Giles and associates starting in the 1980s, and shows how it can be extended today to go beyond the early focus on detrimental aspects of aging. The contributors address social communication within and across age cohorts in all major age categories: the elderly, middle-aged, teenagers and children. The social skewing of the research presented explains the volume's focus on the discursive construction of social identities, with age implicated as a viable controller of how social action is strategically deployed for alignment and alienation, accommodation and divergence. The authors emphasize that a discourse construction of age and ageing is particularly important in the face of new challenges of globalization, increased human mobility and rising intergenerational conflicts.

Autorentext

Anna Duszak and Urszula Okulska, University of Warsaw, Poland.

Inhalt
1;Contents;6
2;Contributors;8
3;Chapter 1. Age and language studies;14
4;Chapter 2. Aging and sociolinguistic variation;40
5;Chapter 3. Multiple identities of elderly Dutch-Australians;64
6;Chapter 4. Narrative as snapshot: Glimpses into the past in Alzheimer s discourse;88
7;Chapter 5. Alliance building and identity work in girls talk: Conversational accomplishments of playful duelling;120
8;Chapter 6. Discursive construction of the JPII Generation in letters of Polish children and teenagers to Pope John Paul II;150
9;Chapter 7. Articulating male and female adolescent identitiesvia the language of personal advertisements: A Malaysian perspective;202
10;Chapter 8. Elder abuse and neglect: A communication framework;234
11;Chapter 9. Discursive construction of (old) age identity in Poland;264
12;Chapter 10. Alcohol as a way of doing adolescence: Perspective, stance and strategy in the discourse of Italian institutions;284
13;Chapter 11. Old and young in discourses of Polish transformations;312
14;Chapter 12. The regime of the adult : Textual manipulations in translated, hybrid and glocal texts for young readers;340
15;Chapter 13. Age and the codification of the English language;360
16;Index;386