Please translate the following paragraphs into Chinese.            Each of the papers in this collection takes up a particular facet of the discursive construction of ageing, and reflects the current broadening and strengthening of discourse-analytic research on ageing. That is, while sociolinguistics itself arguably remains somewhat age-blind, the gap is being filled by important new work, not only from within the discipline but also by inter-disciplinary research that shares many of the foundational assumptions of sociolinguistics. Whether or not the authors brand themselves as sociolinguists (some would and some definitely would not) is far less important than their shared sensitivity to how age-salient meanings are constructed in talk and text, and therefore how social actors ‘come to’ or ‘are brought to’ what it means to be of a certain age in particular social environments. 

One of the clear strengths of this perspective is its empirical foundation. While social theory and social gerontology are prone to generalisations about ageing and society on the basis of survey data and different sorts of trend analysis, and sometimes from intuition alone (cf. Nikander 2009), there is value in looking more closely at particular acts of meaning construction in situ. Through qualitative, contextually rich accounts, we can try to ground our claims and conclusions in primary data – in the social ‘action’ where age comes alive. If ageing is treated as something that we achieve in the minutiae of our social lives, in social encounters of diverse sorts and even in individual acts of expression in speech and writing, we may come to understand how social ageing (treated now as a matter of sociocultural norms, expectations, demands, constraints and opportunities) takes the forms it does. In taking a linguistically-grounded approach, we can therefore look outwards and upwards from the particular to the general, and in doing that we can examine the extent to which local experiences of age-related actions and interactions actually confirm or challenge what macro-social theories tell us contemporary ageing is like. 

A related objective of fine-grained linguistic analysis is to build accounts that are as close as possible to social actors’ own versions of events, wherever possible allowing informants to ‘tell age’ from their own perspectives and in relation to particular social moments and configurations, or else positioning the researcher as a recipient of age-related discourse – these ideas are discussed well by Bytheway (2009) in this collection. Put another way, language-based studies can ‘give voice’ to people as individual informants, in the manner pioneered in some aspects of Gubrium’s research (e.g. Gubrium 1993). This might help us avoid filtering research findings through the kinds of dense analytical and interpretive apparatuses that are associated with many other approaches and methods. Undeniably, there are different methodological orientations to ‘language and ageing’ research too, and linguistic analysis is no panacea. But the present papers all manage to give readers access to some ‘first contact’ linguistically mediated age experiences. These include the unstructured written, personal reflections of particular British people across different time-points (Bytheway 2009), conversations in family homes and conversational interviews with residents of a United States retirement community (Norrick 2009), conversational interviews with Finnish men and women aged around 50 years (Nikander 2009), the casual conversations of older Japanese women (Matsumoto 2009), and my own paper on the semantic constructions of magazine feature-writers and TV programme-makers (Coupland 2009).