Framing the Generations: News Discourse and the Gendered Construction of Generational Identities

This study investigates the linguistic construction of generational personae and how they are framed in news discourse. To achieve this, a corpus of British newspaper articles has been collected and analysed using corpus-based methodologies (Baker 2023; Egbert and Baker 2020; Egbert et al. 2020; Baker and McEnery 2015). By adopting a Critical Discourse Studies approach (Fairclough 2003) and drawing on the tools of Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005), the investigation has revealed how attitudinal meanings help shape and reflect societal perceptions of different generations, at times contributing to what Lumby (2001) defines as ‘generation panics,’ that is, discursive surges of public anxiety that destabilise conventional understandings of age as a cultural and social category. This study additionally explores matters pertaining to masculinity and femininity, focusing on their intersection with generational representations. Furthermore, the following investigation addresses a gap in corpus-based research on generational discourse, where large-scale analyses rarely integrate Appraisal Theory with News Values to explain how evaluations become newsworthy. In this way, by focusing on (Baby) Boomers and Millennials – i.e., the two cohorts that most saliently structure media debates in our corpus – the present study shows how evaluative meanings align with news values to (re)produce ideological framings.