Mining large corpora for social information: The case of elderly

Abstract

Using a large, computerized corpus, this study aims to provide lexico-grammatical evidence of stereotypical constructions of age and aging. It focuses on elderly, a word that is pivotal to the domain in question and whose associative meaning is contested. The collocational profile drawn up on the basis of corpus evidence shows that elderly is primarily associated with discourses of care, disability, and vulnerability, emerging less as a marker of chronological age than of perceived social consequences. In addition to making a contribution to discourse-oriented aging research, the article also demonstrates the use of corpus linguistic methods within a sociolinguistic framework. a