Emotions and ageing: an acoustic and lexical analysis

Abstract

Ageing and the linguistic expression of emotions are two concepts that have been studied from numerous points of view. This paper’s focus is a lexical and prosodic analysis of a corpus consisting of audio files taken from different sources (ZDF Mediathek, YouTube), whose protagonists are old people, native speakers of German. The aim is to investigate the way in which older German speakers express emotions, both from an acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic point of view. The results of the present analysis point out that, despite established works in the field regard ageing as a mainly negative concept – linked with images of deterioration, weakness and loss (cf. Butler 1969 and the concept of ageism) – positive emotions cannot be put aside when analyzing the emotional production of the elderly, both on the lexical and on the prosodic level. Thus, we suggest that ageing should not be studied from an ageism-perspective, but that it should be mainly regarded as a variable on the diastratic variation axis.