Week 7

The Elderly
Outline
 Introduction
 Real and Apparent time
 PSD and humour
 Dementia
 Accommodation
 Elderspeak
 Representations of Ageing
 Summary and Conclusion
 Introduction
 Final lecture for the second
theme

 Focus today on the elderly

 Different approaches to the

study of elderly discourse

 No consensus regarding how to

group the elderly
 Introduction
 Coupland (1998)- issue of social ageing

 Three ways of being old:

1. Inherent (chronological)

2. Developmental (changes related to

significant events in society, or in individual
life or in social policy)

3. Environmental (known as cohort effects i.e.

unique historical experience of people at a
certain time within a cultural group)
 Approaches
 Studies in sociolinguistics have tended to
focus more on chronological age

 Believed to be an ‘inherent’ form of

linguistic variation

 Arguable though

 Featherstone and Hepworth (1990)-

concept of uni-age

 Age-related boundaries more and more

malleable

 Reconfigured as a lifestyle rather than a

biological choice
 Approaches
 Chronological age also commonly split into
sub-categories

 Coupland (1998) – adoption of the term

social gerontology

 Following in the footsteps of medical

professionals using similar methods of
classification

 e.g. ‘young old’, ‘old-old’ versus ‘oldest-old’

 Multiplicity in terminology mirrors the

heterogeneity in the elderly due to the
ageing population issue
 Approaches
 Focus of this lecture, therefore, will be
multi-faceted

 Take a broad approach to the classification

of the elderly

 Focus on speech by, about and for the

elderly

 How do they speak? How are they spoken

about? How are they spoken to?

 Empirical support from various domains

(face-to-face interaction, media and so on)
 Age Grading
 Issue of chronological age

 One of the key concepts in the field of

social stratification of language

 Theoretically speaking

a) age-stratification of linguistic variables

can reflect change in the speech
community as it moves through time
(historical change)

b) change in the speech of an individual as

he/she moves through life (age grading)
U-Curve pattern

Highest prestige,
middle age
 Age Grading
 Llamas (2007) – focus on the
British urban variety of
Middlesbrough (North East of
England)

 Variables: glotallised /p/ and

/k/
1. Glottal /p/ -
2. Glottal /k/ -

 However – an ‘N’ curve rather

than a ‘U’ curve seen
Middlesbrough
 Why?
 Separation of adolescent males from
young adult males

 Usually both categories are

conflated,resulting in the U curve

 Technically – the study’s results prove the

existence of the U curve

 The presentation of the results is slightly

innovative

 Shows the difficulties of classifying

chronological age (what is the cut-off
point?)
 Age Grading
 U curve shows the change in language
over the life time of an individual

 If the change is mirrored at the social level

– language change in progress

 However: hard to prove

 How can we really provide empirical

support that the change taking place in an
individual’s life reflects linguistic ones
taking place at the social level?
 Real and Apparent time
 A methodological issue as well

 Most evidence provided is from apparent

time

 Real time studies are actually quite few

 2 solutions to the problem

 Either follow the same age cohort over a

period of time (longitudinal study)

 Or study the same life stages as they are

occupied by successive age cohorts (i.e. 50
year olds in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 etc)
 Seminal studies
 Real time studies deemed as providing a
more accurate insight

 Hence – empirically valuable

 1 famous seminal study

 Gauchat (1905)- study of phonetic unity in

Charmey, Switzerland

 Famous quote: “L’Unité phonetique de

Charmey est nulle” (Gauchat, 1905:
Chapter 8, cited in Labov, 1972: 276)
 Charmey
 Found variability in the
utilisation of some phonetic
variables

 Biggest fluctuation noticed

between the youngest
generation (below 30 years old),
the middle generation (30-60
years old) and the elderly
generation (60-90 years old)

 One example: change from /ʎ/

to /j/
Activity 1
• Just for fun…

• According to you, what’s the

difference between the
above-mentioned two
variants?

• Can you try to produce them?

Answer
• /ʎ/ is a voiced palatal lateral
approximant

• /j/ is a voiced palatal

approximant

• Here’s the full IPA chart,

followed by a sample of each
sound in syllable initial and
intervocalic positions
Full IPA chart
 Sample
Sound Syllable initial Intervocalic
position

/ʎ/

/j/
 Charmey
 Pattern of age grading is shown
below:

 How can we ascertain that this

age grading is also a change in
progress?
 Charmey
 Real time data provided as well

 Charmey was re-visited by

Hermann in 1929

 Conducted a follow-up
investigation

 Variable rule had turned into a

categorical rule

 /j/ had completely taken over

 Seminal studies
 Other seminal studies

 Trudgill (1988) went back to

Norwich approx. 20 years after his
initial groundbreaking study

 Fieldwork carried out in 1983

 In the 1960s- the vowels for hell and

hull were still distinct

 Backing of /e/ before the lateral ‘l’

 Seminal studies
 From an open-mid front vowel to an open-
mid back vowel

 Example in words such as help or shelf

 Pronounced as /ʌ/

 Mergers were stigmatised, esp. by older

conservative speakers

 In 1983 – merger was complete, esp. in

casual speech

 No stigmatisation evident
Activity 2
• So far, we’ve looked at
linguistic features.

• How about discursive

features?

• According to you, what sorts

of speaking strategies do you
think the elderly will use in
their discourse?
Answer
• Stereotypes exist

• Either boorish, ill-tempered or

rude

• Or sweet but nostalgic

• A little bit ‘behind-the-times’

 PSD and humour
 Elderly discourse characterised by a tactic
labelled as PSD

 Painful self-disclosure (Matsumoto 2009)

 Unhappy personal information on one’s ill-

health, immobility or bereavement is
revealed

 Use of negative stereotypes of old age

 Coupland, Coupland and Giles (1991) –

found this to be true
 PSD and humour
 However – Matsumoto (2009)

 PSD is culture and context- specific

 Focused on Japanese women

 Dyads of women aged 70-87

 A corpus of 40 10-minute
conversations

 Do not conform to stereotypes of

being ‘grumbling’ or ‘disengaged’
 PSD and humour
 In fact- displayed the opposite behaviour

 PSD was always presented in a humorous

vein

 Paradox of the painful but humorous tales

of bereavement and illness

 First statement of illness or death told in a

solemn way

 Followed by comments which generated

laughter both by the speaker and the
addressee
 Example
 Following sample is from 75 year old Akiko

 Talking about the death of her husband 7

months ago

 However – much to the researcher’s

surprise

 She did so by laughing herself

 Described the moment of death itself with a

lot of humour and light-heartedness
Let’s have a look
 Akiko
 Unlike comparable scenes in television
dramas that she had seen

 Neither sweet words of thanks nor any clear

indication of the exact moment of death

 Last words were an imperative construction

telling her to hush

 To allow him to sleep

 Passed away following a 10 year battle with

liver cancer
 Akiko
 Same story could have been told
as a bitter tale of pain

 Yet, Akiko’s PSD was

characterised by laughter

 High number of H and h in her

speech

 Symbols denoting laughter

 PSD
 Reasons for humour in PSD

 As a mitigation device in face-threatening

situations

 Jefferson – listeners may laugh to lighten

the situation created by the trouble-teller

 A sign of empathy

 May break the polite taboo that surrounds

such topics

 Defy and subvert the stereotypical image of

old people as being weak and depressed
 Humour
 Also makes the narrative more ‘tellable’
and intimate

 Right to laugh – a privilege of the elderly

next-of-kin only

 Jefferson - declining to laugh with trouble-

teller taken as a sign of respect

 Ochs and Capps (2001: 34)

“A narrative of personal experience relates

events of great interest or import to
interlocutors and involves events that
impinge on the well-being of the tellers or
those about whom they care”
 Dementia
 Friedland and Miller (1999)

 Focus on bilingualism

 Paradoxical role of the use of

multiple languages

 Have a look at the next clip

Activity 3
• Have a look at the following
clip

• Pay attention to the

researchers being mentioned

• Most of the work considered

seminal not only in the field of
childhood studies and
gerontology but also in
linguistics
 Dementia
 Bilingualism staves off Alzheimer’s
dementia

 However – can prove to be problematic

once you have acquired dementia

 Semantic difficulties occur early on in the

disease

 Grammar and phonology remain relatively

intact until later stages of the disease

 Pragmatic deficits present as well

 Dementia
 Speakers have difficulty using
language in context

 Leads to problems such as topic

maintenance and topic shift

 Preliminary reports suggest that

many people with AD have problems
with language choice or language
separation

 Cf. Grosjean’s language modes

 Dementia
 Healthy bilinguals manage such tasks with
very little conscious effort

 Speakers with AD initially start using the

wrong language (for the situation)

 Or start off in the appropriate language

but other languages intrude for
increasingly longer interludes

 Or use such mixed language that telling

subsystems A and B apart becomes
difficult
 Dementia
 Usually – research has proved that
ageing brings about a surge in L1
dominance in bilingual
conversations

 However – all bilingual speakers

remain sensitive to conversational
footing and interlocutor profile

 Such sensitivity is missing for AD

sufferers
 Illness narratives
 Slight modifications for those who are ill

 Seale and Charteris-Black (2008) – focus

on cancer-stricken individuals

 Above techniques accompanied by

clear-cut gender stratification

 Remember the concepts of powerful and

powerless speeches?

 Elderly males often presented as the

‘privileged gerontocracy’
 Illness narratives
 Slight modifications for those who are ill

 Seale and Charteris-Black (2008) – focus

on cancer-stricken individuals

 Above techniques accompanied by

clear-cut gender stratification

 Remember the concepts of powerful and

powerless speeches?

 Elderly males often presented as the

‘privileged gerontocracy’
 Illness narratives
 Generally – women believed to use
powerless speech

 But – also happen to be more

verbally skilled (Cameron, 2007)

 Men, in contrast, talk but are still

relatively verbally unskilled

 Inability to engage in self disclosing

talk, self revelation, to make
admissions of vulnerability and to
produce cooperative rather than
competitive interaction
 Illness narratives
 Lack of skill important in medical
settings

 102 interviews with breast and

prostate cancer sufferers

 Women talked more than men

(what else is new?)

 Created dense and multiplex in-

group networks

 Emotionally supportive
 Illness narratives
 Men were true survivalists

 Were more intent on interrogation and

direct confrontation with medical
personnel

 Favoured out-group interaction

 Viewed illness as a technical problem to

be solved alone, not within a network

 No hedging (e.g. use of particles such as

‘basically’)
 Hedging
 Extract:

 “Umm well I was diagnosed

when I was just 15 and a half
um with Leukaemia which we
later found out I had the
Philadelphia chromosome as
well which can’t be treated by
just uh radiotherapy it has to,
you have to have a bone
marrow transplant basically.
Powerful speech style
Activity 4
• So far, we’ve looked at the speech
of the elderly.

• Let’s now move on to how we

speak to the elderly?

• What do you think?

• What are some of the strategies

that you use to converse with
elderly relatives/ acquaintances?
 Accommodation
 Deference maxim at work

 Converge towards what we believe

to be the reduced ability of the
elderly

 Gould and Dixon (1997) warn about

the dangers of over-
accommodative speech

 Study looks at the impact of over-

accommodative speech on the
elderly
 Accommodation
 Characteristics of over-
accommodative speech:

1. Slower speech rate

2. Exaggerated intonation
3. Use of high pitch
4. Increased loudness
5. More repetitions
6. Tag questions
7. Altered pronoun use
8. Simplification of vocabulary and
grammar
 Accommodation
 Gould and Dixon (1997) – health care
professionals have been found to have
a higher than normal incidence

 Of prejudicial though towards ageing

 Manipulation of prosody as well (e.g.

sing-song delivery)

 Study had an actor voice out the

instructions in keeping with what is
perceived as the usual style of doctors
 Accommodation
 Recorded the reaction of 82
elderly women

 No actual benefit in terms of

recall

 To worsen matters, so-called

convergence rated very
negatively by the elderly

 Thought that it was slightly

degrading towards them
 Reaction
 Eloquently worded by one of
the informants:

“In the first place, I found the

doctor very patronizing and I
certainly would not have a
doctor who treated me like a
two year old”
 Elderspeak
 Kemper, Vandeputte, Rice, Cheung
and Gubarchuk (1995)

 Termed this type of

overaccommodative speech as
‘elderspeak’

 Or even derogatorily as second baby

talk

 Young adults tend to believe that

elderspeak facilitates communication

 Kemper et al. show that it’s not the

case!
 Elderspeak
 Kemper, Vandeputte, Rice, Cheung
and Gubarchuk (1995)

 Termed this type of

overaccommodative speech as
‘elderspeak’

 Or even derogatorily as second baby

talk

 Young adults tend to believe that

elderspeak facilitates communication

 Kemper et al. show that it’s not the

case!
 Elderspeak
 Looked at inter-group communication
between young adults and the elderly

 Most of the younger speakers were

guilty of using elderspeak

 Compared to researchers who

assigned a referential task (directions
from a map) to both groups

 Showed that non-accommodative

speech was not problematic for the
elderly
 Elderspeak
 Elderspeak – a form of
language prejudice?

 Convergence to a perceived
image rather than to the
actual fact

 Linguistic ageism?
Activity 5
• Let’s move on to the last phase of
this lecture

• How are the elderly presented?

• Think of the media

• Do you see a lot of elderly models

around?

• What sort of images of the elderly

do the media promote?
Activity 5
• Have a look at the following
clip

• It might help start the

discussion.

• The following pictures might

look very familiar as well…
 Representations of ageing
 Similar rhetoric of war

 Ageing viewed as being

overwhelmingly negative

 Glamour – associated with warding off

ageing

 More obvious in the last advert

 Similar language used in the media to

depict ageing

 Needs to be fought at any cost!

 Representations of ageing
 Justine Coupland (2009)

 Looks at the discursive

construction of ageing on the
British show Ten Years
Younger

 A make-over show

 Presenting before and after

shots of the same person
Activity 6
• Have a look at this short clip
from the show

• Focus on the presentation of

the patient

• Language used to describe

her

• Comments?
 Imperative expressions
 J. Coupland (2009)

 Most important linguistic device

used

 Imperative constructions

 Giving orders

 Shows control (or the need to

achieve control) over ageing
 Imperative expressions
 Imperative constructions are
normally quite rare in daily
interactions

 Might constitute a FTA

 Yet- most utilised technique to

represent the elderly

 Shows the prejudicial attitudes of

the society towards the elderly
 Positive representations
 Not a story of doom and gloom
though

 Media is also responsible for

bringing about a change in
mindset

 John Bell (1992)- finds TV shows

such as Murder, She Wrote
redemptive

 Central character Jessical

Fletcher is an energetic and sharp
crime solver
 Positive representations
 Looks at the title songs of shows with
an elderly female character as main
protagonist

 Finds a similar degree of focus on

health and vitality

 Conservative language does not

detract

 Over-accommodation not necessary

either

 However –these shows are the

exceptions rather than the rules!
Summary and Conclusion
 Ageing is inevitable

However- hard to generalise

regarding language

Current generation might

revolutionise the ageing
paradigm

Exposed to technology and so on

from a young age until their old
age

Wait and watch…

Questions/ Comments?
Thank You