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摘 要

本文通过建立语料库检索分析《中华人民共和国老年人保护法》新版本颁布前后一年内（新版本颁布时间为2015年，即2014年和2016年）《今日中国》文章中老年歧视语言的使用状况，分类、归纳、总结老龄语言歧视语在新闻媒体中的使用特点，指出新闻媒体在使用有关老年人的语言歧视表达上所做出的改善以及仍然存在的问题，寄希望于大众传媒能从书面语言开始给予老年人与年轻人一样合理正常的尊重，这符合老龄化时代促进社会和谐发展的需要。老龄语言歧视的主要表现形式可以分为三个主题：假设和判断，非特征性特征和隐性偏见。“senior”和“senior citizens”在《今日中国》中使用次数变多本意是为了避免老龄语言歧视，但是“senior”和其他具有委婉含义的表达法在语言学中仍然被视为老龄语言歧视。也就是说，老龄语言歧视的状况正在得到改善，但仍然有一些难以改变的刻板印象。

关键词：老龄语言歧视，新闻语篇研究，语料库，《今日中国》

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

Abstract ii

摘要 iii

Table of Contents iv

List of Tables v

Chapter One Introduction 1

1.1 Background of the Study 1

1.2 Objective of the Study 2

1.3 Significance of the Study 2

1.4 Layout of the Thesis 3

Chapter Two Literature Review 4

2.1 Defining Linguistic Ageism 4

2.2 Previous Studies at Home and Abroad about Linguistic Ageism 5

Chapter Three Research Method 7

3.1 Research Questions 7

3.2 Corpus 7

3.3 Data Processing and Analysis 10

Assumptions and judgments 10

Uncharacteristic Characteristics 10

Implicit Bias 11

Different Topics of Articles 12

Chapter Four Results and Discussion 12

4.1 Main Expressions and Frequency of Linguistic Ageism in China Today 12

4.2 Variations and Characteristics of Linguistic Ageism in China Today across Time 14

Chapter Five Conclusions 16

5.1 Major Findings 16

5.2 Research Implications 17

5.3 Research Limitations 17

5.4 Future Research Direction 17

References 18

List of Tables

Table 1. Main Expressions in Three Themes of Linguistic Ageism 9

Table 2. Uncharacteristic Characteristics 10

Table 3. Main Expressions and Frequency of Implicit Bias 11

Table 4. Main Expressions and Frequency of Linguistic Ageism 12

Table 5. Linguistic Ageism in Articles about Different Topics 14

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

According to reports, by the end of 2017, there were 241 million people aged 60 or above in China, accounting for 17.3% of the total population. It is generally believed that we have entered an aging society when the population aged 60 or above accounts for 10% of the total population. The aging of the population hastened to bring about huge problems and changes in the society. It not only poses great challenges to the government in terms of pension security and medical consumption, but also imposes higher requirements on protecting the legitimate rights and interests of older people from infringement and improving the spiritual culture of older people.

In order to fully protect the legitimate rights and interests of older people and promote the happiness of older people, the government has formally implemented the "Law of the People's Republic of China on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Older People" since 1996 and developed the cause of older people. By 2015, it had been revised three times. The current version not only provides more practical guarantees for the material and basic living rights of older people, but also puts forward new ideas for respecting older people, creating conditions to help older people realize their value in life, and realize social benefits.

However, in the process of social development, discrimination, erroneous stereotypes, prejudices, thoughts and actions against older people that are unfair or unequal are all over the place in the family or society. Linguistic ageism is one of the easily overlooked social discriminations against older people. In other words, the influence of linguistic ageism is implicit, but profound.

Especially with the deepening of the era of news media communication, the mass media not only play a social function of transmitting information and providing entertainment, but also constantly change people’s values and lifestyles, shaping the public life of the society. Is there linguistic ageism in Chinese mass media? What are the main manifestations of linguistic ageism in Chinese journalism? Is there any improvement in the prohibition of ageist language after the promulgation of a new version of the People’s Republic of China Law for the Protection of Older People? The present study tries to answer these questions by searching and comparing the use of the ageist expressions before and after the implementation of the new version of the Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Older People in China Today.

1.2 Objective of the Study

The aging of the population all over the world has aroused great concern about the issue of aging. Older people have received extensive attention as a group with unique needs and characteristics. As the pioneers of social advancement, older people have made their own contributions to the development of society and laid the foundation for the later generations. Therefore, any kind of social discrimination against older people should be improved. As a disseminator of information and values, any changes the mass media making in the expressions of older people will subconsciously affect batches of readers. This study points out the situation and characteristics of Chinese journalism’s changes so far as linguistic ageism is concerned, which is expected to help find out the ways to let Chinese journalism’s impression on overseas readers run in the positive direction.

1.3 Significance of the Study

Studies related to linguistic ageism are mostly done abroad, but they are rare in China, not to mention corpus-based studies. Although here the study cannot fully analyze the news media's current status of linguistic ageism, but still could remind media workers of this issue, urge them to take timely measures to deal with the problems that exist in the past, and help attract public attention to the equal rights of older people, and give older people more respect.

1.4 Layout of the Thesis

Here the thesis is divided into five sections. Chapter One illustrates the background, objective and significance of the study. Chapter Two is a review of the literature, deriving a definition and measurement of linguistic ageism. Chapter Three explains the research method and process in detail and the fourth chapter analyzes the data and information from the corpus. Chapter Five draws a final conclusion and some comments on future research direction.

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Defining Linguistic Ageism

The phenomenon of social discrimination is very common, and the study of social discrimination in the world came from some social psychologists and anthropologists. In 1963, Goffman first proposed the concept stigma as the origin of social discrimination. Then the stigma is defined as: Because the individual or group has some kind of socially undesirable or disreputable characteristics, which reduces its position in society, stigma is the social derogatory and insulting label of these individuals or groups. The person to whom the label is affixed has some conditions, attributes, qualities, characteristics, or behaviors that are unacceptable in his/her culture. These attributes or behaviors cause the person to feel ashamed, humiliated and even guilty, and cause the society to unfair treatment. Discrimination refers to the society's attitudes and behaviors such as depreciation, alienation, and hostility toward the people labeled with stigma. It is the result of stigmatization (Goffman, 1963).

As for ageism, it was defined as “the stereotypes, prejudices, and the resulting thoughts and behaviors that are popular in society to a certain extent to older people” (Duan and Wang, 2011; Luan and Liu, 2016). In fact, ageism, in the form of pervasive negative attitudes about older persons, is widely accepted and normative for most cultures (Boduroglu, Yoon, Luo, amp; Park, 2006; Ng, 2002). The term "ageism" was first proposed by Butler (1969), chairman of the U.S. International Longevity Center, referring to prejudice and discrimination specifically targeted at older people. Bytler (1995) ranks ageism as the third largest discrimination in society, only after racial and gender discrimination. Some scholars believe that ageism is the most serious form of age discrimination (Rupp, Vodanovich amp; Crede, 2005). The reasons that lead to ageism are complex and covert. One of the causes is gerontophobia, or fear of aging, which perpetuated by ageist stereotypes that lead people to fear their own aging. So also ageist expressions may be well-intentioned on the surface as a compliment (e.g., addressing an older woman as “young lady”) when in fact they subtly perpetuate the idea that “old” is bad. (Gendron et al, 2015).

Language is powerful, and it is astonishing as to the destructive power of linguistic discrimination against others. To be worse, linguistic discrimination embodies the dominant group's discrimination against vulnerable groups in essence. In the market economy, the true nature of the media is to get access to the rich and avoid the poor because of the reports on marginal groups could not see economic benefits for a long time. Therefore, the target audience of the media is the “mainstream people” of the city, and their target is to maintain the mainstream ideology, advocate high-grade living standards, promote the elite lifestyle, and ignore or even eliminate the information and expressed needs of marginalized people. The limited scope for reporting the marginalized people ranges from taking a top-down view, to present evidence for the glory of the elite. The imbalance between economic and social development is the soil that generates media linguistic discrimination.

Overall, the linguistic ageism could be concluded that society ( the media) show its stereotype, prejudices, attitude and the resulting thoughts and behaviors by using overt and covert expressions to stigmatize older people (including the image, language, knowledge, behaviors and abilities, etc. of older people) which reveals the prejudice of mainstream groups to vulnerable groups.

2.2 Previous Studies at Home and Abroad about Linguistic Ageism

In domestic research, there is no specific study of linguistic ageism, not to mention the study of changes in the expression of news media. However, there are many studies on ageism.

Overall, research on the ageism in the news media include three aspects: Firstly, Zhang and other some scholars have studied the image of older people in the media. The overall newspaper media shows various image of older people, including positive, negative and vulnerable images. The image of the “the fall-down elderly” in news media highlights the characteristics of the old, weak, rude and unreasonable; Secondly, Jiang , Zhou and some researchers have found that the media is one of the sources of social ageism (society, media, and library materials are the major sources of people’s negative attitudes toward older people). Lack of the intergenerational contacts and the understanding of aging knowledge are the main reasons that why people have discrimination of the old people; Thirdly, Sun and some scholars have explored how the media play a role in the process of changing the discrimination of older people. Because it shoulders the responsibility for eliminating people’s misconceptions to older people and gave them correct guidance so that the media could become the "shock absorber" of social conflicts and the "safety valve" in stabilizing the society.

Linguistic discrimination in the media is also a major social issue, and many scholars are also competing to study their phenomena and causes (Li, 2007). For example, the statement “The energetic 65-year-old salesman works 5 days a week” and “The old grandmother campaigned for the mayor has succeed” intentionally led the reader’s attention to age, weakened the news facts, and showed discrimination.

In foreign studies, there is an abundance of research describing the phenomenon of discriminatory linguistic encoding in areas such as racism and sexism (e.g., Cameron amp; Kulick, 2003; Reisigl amp; Wodak, 2001; Weatherall, 2002). However, in terms of ageism, there were rare studies except scholars Tracey L. Gendron et al, who have reached a consensus on terms that include the meaning of ageism. However, their researches focus on the linguistic ageism in daily life, not as formal as the language of the article. Therefore, the present study devoted to studying the current status of the linguistic ageism in the news media is worthy of attention.

In summary, linguistically based studies of linguistic ageism are not common at home and abroad, so no systematic research has been conducted. Here the study could make some contribution to the corpus-based linguistic studies of linguistic ageism by studying the current status of the linguistic ageism in the news media.

Chapter Three Research Method

3.1 Research Questions

In order to study the status quo of linguistic ageism in China Today after the People’s Republic of China Law for the Protection of Older People, this article attempts to answer two questions: What are the main expressions and frequency of linguistic ageism in China Today ? What are the variations and characteristics of linguistic ageism in China Today across time?

3.2 Corpus

The research used corpus research methods to comprehensively grasp the expressions of linguistic ageism before and after the implementation of the new version of the Law on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Older People.

The Law of the People's Republic of China on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Older People was a law enacted to protect the legitimate rights and interests of older people, develop the cause of aging, and promote the virtues of the Chinese nation in respecting, supporting and helping older people. It was first adopted on August 29, 1996, and the current version was amended at the 14th meeting of the Standing Committee of the Twelfth National People’s Congress on April 24, 2015. Therefore, the research object was limited within the certain period before and after the implementation of the new version, and the time was restricted within one year, that was 2014 and 2016.

The source of corpus was from the articles of China Today, which was committed to timely and in-depth coverage of the realities of contemporary China’s economic development, social progress, people’s lives, culture and arts, mountains and rivers, and ethnic customs. All articles that were extracted as corpus resources were about 17741KBytes, 9146KBytes in 2014 and 8594KBtypes in 2016, including 786 articles in total, with the articles related to economy, politics, society, culture and environment accounting for about 20% of the total corpus respectively.

All the articles were put into WordSmith 6.0 to build the database. An open coding was conducted in order to identify, categorize and describe the phenomena found in the articles. As a result, three themes about using language to discriminate against older people emerged from the thematic analysis of the articles: assumptions and judgments, uncharacteristic characteristics and implicit bias.

Assumptions and judgments emerge in two different manners. They appear as a representation of the young people’s thinking about aging and older adults as well as a representation of the young people’s interpretation of the older adult’s thinking about their own aging and older people in general. It was the generalization of the younger about older people based on assumptions and judgments, which breeds the ageist stereotypes that lead them to fear their own aging and influence others, making age stereotypes widely accepted. For example, in stereotype content model(SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, amp; Xu, 2002), older people are stereotyped as a group of people who are warm but incompete. Therefore any metonyms or adjectives used to specifically refer to older people can be considered as linguistic ageism.

Some ageists believe that older people are essentially different from others. Younger ageists think the relationship between them and older people was “we versus them”, and older ageists are afraid of being “other”, (e.g. an older adult who does not want to be associated with “all of those old people”) they do not recognize that they are older people. So the expressions and modal particles that represent certain actions and behaviors are unusual, or outside of the norm, for older people could be regarded as linguistic ageism. For example, my mentor is sixty but she still looks like a fashion girl. The word “fashion” which belongs to the characteristic of young people was here used to modify older people.

Bias represents a prejudice; a preconceived opinion about someone or something. Stereotyping is a form of bias that represents the application of an individual’s own thoughts, beliefs, and expectations onto other individuals without first obtaining factual knowledge about the individual (Fiske, 2010). Discrimination is the application of beliefs that are based on prejudices and stereotype (Fiske, 2010). Bias is a negative evaluation of one group in relation to another group and can be expressed both explicitly and implicitly. Explicit bias is generally considered unacceptable. Implicit bias is hidden and unintentional. It can be unknowingly activated and transmitted without a person’s intent or awareness, making it very difficult to both measure and control (Blair, Steiner, amp; Havranek, 2011; Devine, 1989). Implicit bias against older people embody the expressions that describe “old” as a bad, negative or undesirable state as well as describing looking and acting “young” as a good, positive attribute of linguistic ageism.

The typical expressions which have been recognized by linguistic scholars as a discriminatory title for older people were listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Main Expressions in Three Themes of Linguistic Ageism

3.3 Data Processing and Analysis

3.3.1 Assumptions and judgments

Using discriminatory words from Figure 1 as search terms could obtain the count and frequency of those terms that occurred in all articles as well as the proportion of the total.

3.3.2 Uncharacteristic Characteristics

Using words that do not belong to the characteristics of older people to describe older people could impart discriminatory meaning to these words, I then searched for some representative words in the corpus and analyzed whether they have the discriminatory meaning of older people in China Today. The following was the result of data.

Table 2. Uncharacteristic Characteristics

It can be seen that these words with the characteristics of young people are not used to modify older people in articles of China Today. Because in our research, there were no expressions that represented uncharacteristic characteristics of linguistic ageism in a specific context, such terms had no research significance in this study and would not be explained in more detail in later results.

3.3.3 Implicit Bias

Then I retrieved "old" and "young" in the corpus, analyzed whether those "old" have negative meaning or those "young" have positive meaning one by one, and recorded the number and frequency. The following were two examples of “old” having negative implications (1)(2); and two examples of “old” having neutral states(3)(4) from China Today. Same for “young”.

(1)China’s TFP growth has been the main source of its economic growth since its opening-up and reform, and suggest that China will become affluent before getting old.

(2)The 21st century, defined by multi-polarization and globalization, must abandon old security concepts associated with hegemony, power politics and military supremacy and instead embrace those of mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality and coordination.

(3)Apart from old friends, new acquaintances also lent me a hand.

(4)Last month I was invited out for a Korean barbecue by a 23-year-old Chinese friend of mine, Huang Xuesong.

Table 3. Main Expressions and Frequency of Implicit Bias

The purpose of retrieving “young” is to provide special evidence for the negative meaning of “old”, but from the perspective of the data, since “young” itself is a positive word and has always been the positive meaning in this study, “young” does not have research significance in this study.

3.3.4 Different Topics of Articles

China Today is a comprehensive news media outlet that integrates economic, political, cultural, social, and environmental issues, so articles could fall into these five categories. So then I classify all articles that containing expressions of linguistic ageism.

Chapter Four Results and Discussion

4.1 Main Expressions and Frequency of Linguistic Ageism in China Today

According to data analysis, the main expressions of linguistic ageism could be divided into three themes: assumptions and judgments, uncharacteristic characteristics and implicit Bias.

Table 4. Main Expressions and Frequency of Linguistic Ageism

The generalization of the young people about older people mostly based on assumptions and judgments, which implies that the ageists believe older people are different from younger people and therefore use unique terms to specially refer to older people. Those expressions are presented in figure 1. These expressions of linguistic ageism had a long history and deep influence. In general, the total number of expressions of linguistic ageism in 2014 was 219, which took up 2.39% of the total articles; “senior” occurred most, followed by “the old”. The reason was that some people think that the use of euphemisms such as “senior, senior citizen and the elderly” to replace “the old, old people, old age” and other explicit linguistic ageism could better express their respect for older people. However, according to the linguistic survey, older people did not like to be called “senior or senior citizen”, so these expressions that have euphemistic meanings were also discriminatory expressions. But it was clear that the authors of China Today are not aware of this, so the situation had emerged that the most frequently used expression is “senior”; what was worse, many authors still used “ the old” and “the aged” that were not euphemisms, even “old folks”-- a expression with extreme discrimination-- was used. Similarly, the highest number 138 was from “senior” in all Chinese texts in 2016, and some explicit discriminatory expressions had disappeared. For example, old people, old age and etc.

The next one is that the expression “old” had negative implication of being “bad” while “young” was described as “good” or positive attribution，which was similar with the implication of uncharacteristic characteristics, but “young” was the most common implication with discrimination against older people. For example, ageists address eighty-year-old woman as young lady，which in fact subtly perpetuate the idea that “old” is bad. This could be proved in the search data of corpus, “old” did not have 100% negative implication. However, “old” in this study has occurred 318 times, where 224 times were negative, accounting for 2.24% of the total number of words. Same for 2016. It was time draw the attention of the media to such expressions with implication of linguistic ageism.

Overall, the part phenomena of linguistic ageism has been improved but some stubborn stereotypical expressions still existed at anywhere.

4.2 Variations and Characteristics of Linguistic Ageism in China Today across Time

After the collection and analysis of data, we could see some variations and characteristics of the expression of linguistic ageism from Table 3.

In general, the number and frequency of expressions of linguistic ageism in 2016 have slightly decreased compared with that in 2014, among them, the usage rate of “senior” and “senior citizens” has greatly increased, and the expressions such as “old folk”, which have extreme discriminatory meaning, have rarely appeared in 2016.

The variations in the frequency of main expressions have been introduced in detail in the previous section, and another variations are happened on the distribution of expressions of linguistic ageism in the category of articles. China Today is a comprehensive news media outlet that integrates economic, political, cultural, social, and environmental issues, so articles could fall into these five categories.

Table 5. Linguistic Ageism in Articles about Different Topics

The frequency of economic articles involving the expressions of linguistic ageism is consistently high, and the frequency in social terms is decreasing or even trivial. However, the proportion of discriminatory expressions in the soft culture and environmental category of articles is increasing.

The frequency of expressions of linguistic ageism in economic articles has not much changed between 2014 and 2016, and they all belong to high frequencies. However, the frequency in social articles has suddenly declined to 0 in 2016, which is truly surprising while in cultural and environmental articles, the frequency has soared to more than 25% and people have to worry about it. Summarizing the research results can draw some characteristics of expressions of linguistic ageism and their changes：

The main expressions of linguistic ageism can be divided into three themes: assumptions and judgments, uncharacteristic characteristics and implicit bias. In general, the number and frequency of expressions of linguistic ageism have decreased while the number and frequency of expressions that have euphemistic meaning such as “senior” have increased, the extreme discriminatory expression “old folk” has disappeared. It is very common to use “old” with negative implication and it need to be improved. The expressions of linguistic ageism have high frequency in economic articles, while they have soared in cultural and environmental articles. To be specific, “senior/senior citizens” are used more to try to avoid “old people” -the expressions of linguistics ageism to refer to older people, however, “senior” and other expressions with euphemistic meaning are still considered as linguistic ageism.

Chapter Five Conclusions

5.1 Major Findings

Corpus-based linguistic study makes the conclusions drawn from the research are more persuasive. In order to find out the expressions of linguistics ageism that have far-reaching impact on readers and how to decrease its influence so as to avoid linguistic ageism as much as possible, we establish a corpus by using about 50 thousand words from China Today- a comprehensive newspaper media, then classify, summarize, and analyze the study data to obtain the main expressions of linguistic ageism and their variations with characteristics.

Three social attitudes that use language to discriminate against older people emerged from the thematic analysis of the articles: assumptions and judgments, uncharacteristic characteristics and implicit bias. Based on these three themes, we analyze a series of data changes in the expression of linguistic ageism, and then conclude the status, variations, and characteristics of linguistic ageism in the news media.

Then the main characteristics of linguistic ageism as follows:In general, the number and frequency of expressions of linguistic ageism have decreased while the number and frequency of expressions that have euphemistic meaning such as “senior” have increased, the extreme discriminatory expression “old folk” has disappeared. It is very common to use “old” with negative implication and it need to be improved. The expressions of linguistic ageism have high frequency in economic articles, while they have soared in cultural and environmental articles. To be specific, “senior/senior citizens” are used more to try to avoid “old people” -the expressions of linguistics ageism to refer to older people, however, “senior” and other expressions with euphemistic meaning are still considered as linguistic ageism.

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