Fokus ålder : betydelserelationer och betydelseförändring i användning

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to study how words denoting age are used in newspaper texts. I have chosen mainly to study the following Swedish focus words for females and males of different ages (flicka, kvinna, tjej, dam; pojke, man, kille and herre) as they relate to age. Furthermore, age lexemes – different variations of Swedish expressions of age – are investigated and finally also a number of new Swedish expressions that are used to describe age – kids, förtis, grups, tweenie, mappie, senior and what I call “plus gradings” – e.g. 50 +.The study is particularly concerned with where and how age is referred to and how the chosen focus words relate in different ways to age and sex – and finally also with how these things have changed over time. I have examined newspaper corpora from three separate years – 1965, 1987 and 2000. My theoretical perspective is social constructivist, age being understood as something that is constructed and negotiated in language use. As for method, I adopt a corpus linguistic approach – large corpora and quantitative language patterns in frequencies and lexical content. Thus, my investigation is aimed at the focus words, the age lexemes and the terms in their linguistic contexts, primarily as regards adjective attributes, lexical relations and collocations.My conclusion is that the examined expressions occur in different contexts and are used in different ways, but are not always related to age or age differentiation. I have noticed a couple of tendencies; one relates to vagueness when it comes to age and one relates to a semantic division of labour. The focus words are both used as synonyms and as oppositions, and they refer to referents belonging to different age groups. At the same time there is a clear division of labour between them in that variation in many contexts relates more to subject and contextual pattern than to different chronological ages. Ihave also noticed that chronological age is generally used when something is unusual, deviant or when the context has to do with crime, sports, (change of or debut in) a profession, birthday announcements etc.