please translate the following paragraphs into Chinese. To this extent it would be interesting to explore how a language or discourse perspective in future research might contribute to the main themes that have been examined in recent years in Ageing & Society. The journal has a strong record of publishing research on social policy, e.g. the problems and potential solutions of older people’s housing, mobility, social exclusion, welfare and pensions; on care and social support, e.g. family structures, intergenerational relationships, care-giving by family members, and bereavement; on health, e.g. health promotion and life expectancy, coping with illness, falls, drug use or dementia; and on age-related lifestyles, e.g. older workers, post-retirement activity and wellbeing, religion and spirituality, quality of life, active ageing, stereotypes and ageism in advertising, body image and body work. For each of these broad topics, it is obvious that sociolinguistic and communication issues are important, but very few recent papers have taken an explicitly communicative or discursive approach. Many have acknowledged at some level that ageing achieves personal and social significance in the details of contextualised relationships and networks, individual variability is generally taken for granted rather than a matter for empirical inquiry. In some cases, even for researchers who are not linguists, there is no methodological alternative to collecting data in the form of written accounts or spoken interview responses. Under those circumstances, closer attention to the linguistic forms and functions of the data could be revealing. In other cases, research has addressed themes that are themselves defined in communicative terms, for example in relation to care-giving or social support. In such research, the question is whether a closer examination of text and talk might enrich analyses or yield more contextualised or indeed different findings. 

The papers in this collection seek to demonstrate the sorts of insight that stem from a (broadly) sociolinguistic framing of research into ageing and old age. Using situated discourse as data, and qualitative methods of analysis, they focus on the role of language in shaping what is usually referred to, in category-bound terminology, as mid-life and late-life experience. The data that have been analysed are very diverse culturally and by situation, but the theories and methods are from a fairly unified pool, albeit one with various disciplinary labels: interactional sociolinguistics, narrative theory, critical pragmatics, social theory, discursive psychology and, of course, social gerontology itself. The focus in this issue is on change and how it associates with shifting age-identities, so emphasising how change is discursively interpreted and negotiated both by and for or about individuals in various social frames. The papers examine how individuals, as they move through the lifespan, negotiate their changing identities through talk-in-interaction, and through their production, reading and interpretation of texts. Change with age is something we commonly take for granted, but what do we make of these changes, and how do we find meaning in them ? How do we and others relate to change, and how do we represent change and incorporate it into the impressions we give of ourselves to others, and of others to them? A recent paper in this journal commented on the fluidity in social categorisation that the presented papers take as their starting point. Vincent (2007) focused on the potential for variation and variability in the experience of ageing, as afforded by age-related categorisation processes, such as what it means to be 50, 70 or 90 years of age:

 Some aspects of the trajectory of social and biological changes over the lifespan are defined as ‘ageing’. Age is also understood as a sequence of categories differentiated by specific criteria – including not least measures of chronology. Human cultures not only classify individuals and groups by ‘age’ but also develop normative expectations about ‘ageing’. The specific content of these processes and categories are contested and their meanings are not fixed. (Vincent 2007: 943) Our biological and chronological ageing are, in objective terms, immutable and indisputable, at least until we start to see chronology as a socially created and endorsed meaning system, and until we realise that biological ageing is only one of several metrics that we can impose on ourselves and others (as discussed in my later paper). Objective metrics need to be interpreted and recontextualised by the stances people take on ageing (Coupland and Coupland 2009), and the social experience of ageing and change is constituted by acts of self- and other-positioning (Harre´ 1983), which brings us back to discourse (see Nikander 2009). We are both constrained and enabled through our engagement with cultural scripts about ageing, and the textual reflexes of such scripts are available as data of different sorts – in reflective autobiographical accounts, in private conversations, in more public discourses, and in mass-media texts and images. The interface between discourse and identity is a central concern of all the papers that follow. But age-identity is not separable from other social dimensions in which identities are constructed or attributed, such as gender, sexuality, class, culture, religion, nationality and profession. A discourse-analytic approach assumes that identities are complexes of meaning potential, waiting to be triggered or activated or made salient under particular circumstances and in the flow of social life and social interaction. As Blommaert put it: Almost any significant author in the wide field of identity studies would argue that people don’t have an identity, but that identities are constructed in practices that produce, enact, or perform identity – identity is identification, an outcome of socially conditioned semiotic work. (2005: 205) In this framework, analysts need to track the processes of social identifi- cation that emerge in linguistic data, rather than come to texts and contexts with a pre-defined taxonomy of social types and attributes. The perspective assumes that social identification is a form of social action or ‘work’ that: (a) takes place in specific social settings whose constitution needs to be worked through as part of the analysis; (b) yields shifting constellations of identities, instead of individual, monolithic identity categories; (c) does not simply inhere in and emanate from an individual person, but results from processes of negotiation and an interplay of voices and authors; (d) involves processes of ‘entextualisation’ (generating meaningful ‘texts of identity’) and often ‘ re-entextualisation’ (revising and reformatting earlier versions of a social identity, perhaps deriving from earlier texts of cultural scripts). In short, then, identity is treated as the product of particular forms of ‘discursive work’ (De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006: 2). People are simultaneously the products and the producers of discourse, and language is treated as both a constraining and an enabling resource.