Representations of Middle Age. A Corpus Linguistic Study of The New York Times’s Letters to the Editor (1990– 2019)

Although the two processes of demographic and epidemiologic transition have resulted in a reassessment and a re- evaluation of midlife, which is no longer stereotypically pointed at as the time of the ‘midlife crisis’, but as a high point in terms of social, economic and occupational aspects, the expression still seems to carry with it controversial social prestige, thus resulting in a weak age- group identification. The paper, which is meant as a development of two previous studies that focused on how older people are represented in the popular press, analyses a corpus of readers’ letters to the editor published in the New York Times from 1990 to 2019, following the methodology of corpus- assisted discourse analysis. As letters offer an insight into how people generally perceive and represent a topic, this medium has been chosen to investigate how middle age has been portrayed and discussed in the last thirty years. Particular emphasis was thus placed on the themes that surround this life stage, how they have changed with time, and which stereotypes they evoke, also in comparison with those associated to older people, which may offer an insight into how such an important period of one’s life is experienced, portrayed and perceived.