A Study Of Terms Addressing Older Adults In English Abstracts Of Chinese Academic Papers In Gerontology

With the aggravation of population aging,ageism has become one of the hot issues in gerontology,demography,sociology,nursing,medicine and other fields.Present studies of ageism mainly focus on the phenomenon of ageism existing in different social fields,with the emphasis on the ageist attitudes from different groups of people and the perception of ageism by older adults.Nevertheless,studies of ageism in language,from the perspective of linguistics,are relatively scarce,and even less is the discussion on terms addressing older adults with discriminate and stereotypical inclinations in academic discourse.Based on the framework of Fairclough's Three Dimensional Model(1989)and relevant principles of research ethics,this study adopts the methods of a self-built corpus and text analysis,for the purpose of studying the terms addressing older adults in gerontological academic papers written by Chinese researchers from the perspectives of frequencies,collocation,word clusters and semantic prosody.The analysis is conducted to figure out whether the terms addressing older adults in the corpus have ageist inclinations or not,and attempts to explore the causes of the existing inappropriate use of terms addressing older adults from the perspectives of research ethics,social,and cultural factors..This study specially focuses on three points: first,the frequencies of terms addressing older adults in the English abstracts of Chinese gerontological academic papers;Second,the features of terms addressing older adults with ageist inclinations in the English abstracts of Chinese gerontological academic papers from the perspectives of collocation,word clusters and semantic prosodies;Third,the causes of ageism existing in the terms addressing older adults in the English abstracts of Chinese gerontological academic papers.The major findings of this study are as follows: first,terms addressing older adults in the self-built corpus with high frequencies are “elderly”,“old”,“aged”,“senior” and “older”,among which “elderly” has the highest frequency;second,mostterms addressing older adults in this self-built corpus are inherently ageist for their internal negative meanings and distorted euphemistic connotations,and the only neutral term with no ageist attitudes or euphemistic connotations is “older”;third,all the terms addressing older adults in the self-built corpus are used in the plural forms,resulting in the construction of homogeneous group identities of older adults;all the terms addressing older adults in the self-built corpus are frequently used as prepositional objects,and older adults are passively presupposed by researchers as dependent and care-needing;negative semantic prosodies are prevalent in most adjective,nominal and verbal collocates of terms addressing older adults,who are viewed as a particular disadvantaged group susceptible to various diseases and stress,and as patients and recipients of health care and social support;fourth,three influential factors contribute to the ageist inclinations of terms addressing older adults in the self-built corpus,namely,the absence of institutional regulation and guidelines of language use in academic writing,the lack of Chinese writers' awareness of research ethics,and the impacts of the media report and the changing traditional cultural values.The significance of this study lies in four aspects: first,it helps broaden the research field of linguistic and gerontology by studying the terms addressing older adults with ageist inclinations in Chinese gerontological academic papers;second,it widens the horizon for studies of rhetoric across curriculum,especially the writing of abstracts in various disciplines;third,it provides a clear definition of ageist language and produces a new list of terms addressing older adults;fourth,this study arouses attention from gerontological and linguistic researchers so that they would avoid the unintended use of ageist terms in their academic writing,and that from teachers of academic writing so that they may intentionally instruct students with ageism and ageist terms which should be cautious of.