Please translate the following paragraphs into Chinese.     We can be surprised when listening to and analysing age-related language – whether our own or other people’s, and whether in our personal experience or as represented in research studies of the sort collected here. Often language gives pause for thought, if only because it confronts us with the great diversity of stances, experiences, identities and evaluations that are projected in the name of age-categories, like ‘being middle-aged’ or ‘being old’ (the main foci of this particular collection). Contemporary emphases in discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and social pragmatics focus attention on the instability of social categories (see Jaworski and Coupland 2006 for an overview). Critical approaches to discourse (see Fairclough and Wodak 1997) emerged partly out of dissatisfaction with overly determined and determining social categories found in much empirical social research, as in studies that pre-define social groups by age-groups or sex and that seek to differentiate people into enshrined social groups. 

Much early sociolinguistic research also used designs of this general sort. While social typologies can hardly be avoided when collecting or analysing survey data, close analysis of discourse generally shows that the social categories to which we are accustomed (as both researchers and lay observers and participants in social life) do not have the coherence and stability that we tend to assume. The ways in which we invoke ‘being 50’, for example, are often complex and may be mitigated or carefully contextualised. Many constructions are provisional expressions during extended negotiated sequences, and others are for some particular immediate purpose; whichever, they are unlikely to be full or final accounts of the meaning of being 50 (Coupland 2000). 

This observation accords with general theory in pragmatics (the study of how meaning accrues in practical activities of talk in social contexts). As Matsumoto (2009) explains in her paper, as a matter of principle communicative acts are only partially determined by their linguistic forms. Single utterances realise multiple and often conflicting communicative functions, and meaning emerges in the flow of discourse between multiple parties, often obliquely and inferentially. Not surprisingly then, acts of ageidentity through discourse often create multi-faceted and multiple images of and values for self and other. As Norrick (2009) establishes in his paper, when people narrate their own identities in talk, they construct different versions of themselves, not least because a story often requires someone to present themselves as the ‘ I’ of the story-teller separately from the ‘ I’ of the protagonist self – the self being ‘ storied’. In age terms, as in other regards, the narrativised self is therefore not necessarily uniform, and we have to accept that such coherence as does exist is a construction of the acts of telling (Linde 1993, 2009). This is not to say that texts and discourses never construct particularised images and identities. My own paper focuses on age projections in media texts that I argue are unwarrantedly narrow and prejudicial. The apposite generalisation is that age-related identities and age attributions are always matters of discursive contextualisation and their values have to be constructed and read relative to particular social contexts – particular communicative roles and relationships, particular architectures of situation, genre and purpose – and set against particular social norms and assumptions. 

Unsatisfactory as this might sound in its complexity and relativism, it opens a window on different possibilities and definitions for individuals in their age categories and for ageing in general. A commitment to avoid over-determining age is probably an appropriate principle and prerequisite for gerontological research: as understanding of ageing and old age grows, an awareness of heterogeneity slowly supplants broad characterisations. While readers of this journal will be well informed about the real and sometimes depressingly real social correlates of old age, they will also be aware of the risk of over-generalising about age and the links between life-stage and experience in an increasingly complex and fluid social world. Later life is clearly not merely a matter of how it is talked into existence, a claim sometimes (simplistically) associated with Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) thesis on the social construction of reality. Nor is it a prefigured condition that we enter and assimilate without agentive rights and opportunities, including to represent ourselves and our social relations with a degree of constructive freedom (Archer 2003). It might be that claims about ‘agelessness’ are themselves an articulation of a form of ageism (Andrews 1999), but old age is neither ‘pre-discursive’ nor ‘extradiscursive’ nor a matter of essential being. Nikander (2009) points to the contradictions and complexities of ageing in an increasingly globalised world, and a discourse analytic approach to social gerontology resonates with the potential openness and indeterminacy that this implies.