Book announcement: Laura Tommaso, Ageing Discourse in the News: A Corpus-Assisted Study

Abstract

Discourse shapes the way we perceive and interact with the world around us, and the representation of complex social concepts such as ageing in the media plays a crucial role in the construction of cultural attitudes and norms, especially in societies where these representations are slowly becoming discursive tools to establish generational dichotomies and disparities. Therefore, Laura Tommaso’s monograph, Ageing Discourse in the News: A Corpus-Assisted Study, provides a comprehensive analysis of how the notion of ‘ageing’ is discursively constructed and construed in the UK press, combining techniques from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Grounded in the understanding that the way ageing is portrayed in the media reflects a society’s world views and value systems, Laura Tommaso’s study underlines the rules and standards of conduct that are at the very basis of the conceptualisation of age in discourse (Gamliel, 2004; Bytheway, 2005).