Book review: Laura Tommaso, Ageing Discourse in the News: A Corpus-Assisted Study

Discourse shapes the way we perceive and interact with the world around us, and the representation of complex social concepts such as aging in the media plays a crucial role in the construction of cultural attitudes and norms, especially in societies where these representations are slowly becoming discursive tools to establish generational dichotomies and disparities. Therefore, Laura Tommaso’s monograph, Aging Discourse in the News: A Corpus-Assisted Study, provides a comprehensive analysis of how the notion of aging is discursively constructed and construed in the UK press, combining techniques from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Grounded in the understanding that the way aging is portrayed in the media reflects a society’s world views and value systems, Laura Tommaso’s study underlines the rules and standards of conduct that are at the very basis of the conceptualization of age in discourse (Gamliel 2004; Bytheway 2005).