Textual representation of aging and ageist attitudes in modern women's discourse

Statement of the problem. The results of interdisciplinary studies show that the aging process was causelessly associated with words of decline, vulnerability and has a gender marking. The relationship between these two identities is complex, and as linguistic research, it has not been studied to a sufficient extent yet, and does not have a satisfactory theoretical foundation. The purpose of the article is to analyze lexical units with ageist semantics excerpted from literary works and identify semantic groups that are based on certain stereotypical attitudes associated with the aging process. Materials and methods. The research material is the prose of American female writers K. Bushnell and S. Mayer, containing examples of age stereotypes. The main methods of analysis are the continuous sampling method, the hypothetical-deductive method, the descriptive method with its main components (observation, description, generalization), as well as the method of contextual-pragmatic interpretation. Conclusions. In the course of the work, it is revealed that under the influence of formed ageist attitudes, negative thoughts about senescence can become inward-looking and become a source of gerontophobia. In the works under study, the language of ageism is divided into five semantic groups, including explicit expressions of personages, as well as implicit author’s bias.