Vieillesse, old-age and lǎonián Analysis of a discursive construction of care in the context of Alzheimer disease

Résumé En

Alzheimer's disease is not a direct consequence of ageing, but it mainly concerns older people. In France, it affects one in 5 people over the age of 80. The carers of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's therefore have to deal with people who are gradually losing their abilities as a result of both old age and disease. We invite here to look at the lexical representation of old age, in particular, in French, English and Chinese Mandarin, on the basis of their respective definitions in language dictionaries, in order to understand how the different languages take account of this period of life through this denomination and how these representations rooted in a languageculture can say/act on the ability of family carers to look after their relative. We then illustrate the discursive (de-)construction of this representation in French, as carried out in the Accmadial corpus (Accompagnants des Malades diagnostiqués Alzheimer) AAP 'handicap et autonomie, IRESP 2020-2022, CPER DI2L2S MSH 2018) consisting of semi-directive interviews conducted with spouses/partners, children and grandchildren of people affected by this neurodegenerative disease in Western France. This is be done from two perspectives : a linguistic one, in order to illustrate the semanticopragmatic and semantico-discursive mechanisms of meaning construction; and an intercultural one, in order to explore, on the basis of linguistic clues, representations of the world perceived and modalised across three language-cultures.