Ageing - A Corpus-Driven Study of Newspaper Texts in German and Portuguese

Abstract

The designations employed for senior citizens, as well as to describe the universe around them, reflect society’s perception of these issues. This language gives rise to critical reflection on phenomena of linguistic taboos and euphemisms, which are particularly interesting to analyse when studying and contrasting languages. The intuitive perception of the language used in the media lacks, however, tools of analysis that allow us to have a more accurate knowledge of the designations employed and their contexts. To this end, corpora analysis is a methodology which allows a more precise identification and description of the linguistic phenomena under analysis, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. The study presented here is therefore part of a linguistic and contrastive perspective. The research focuses on the lexical-semantic field of the third age, based on corpora texts from the German and Portuguese written
press. Reflecting the demographic evolution and social changes of the last century, this field is
particularly interesting and has been the object of sociolinguistic studies in several languages.