Although the world wide web has become a popular object of and tool for different kinds of semiotic and linguistic investigation, critical discourse analysis (CDA) does not seem to share this enthusiasm in equal measure. The contemporary relevance of the web as a key site for the articulation of social issues should make it a prime target for critical discourse analysts with a political and emancipatory brief. Nonetheless, CDA publications are still predominantly based on conventional, non-electronic sources of data. This article discusses the analytic potential that web-based data opens up and also identifies the specific challenges that arise as a result. These are linked to the size of the web, its diversity, ephemeral quality, interactivity, and multimodality. Indicating directions in which future research might proceed, the article makes a plea for more critical discourse analysts to work with web-based corpora.

A B S T R A C T Using a large, computerized corpus, this study aims to provide lexicogrammatical evidence of stereotypical constructions of age and aging. It focuses on elderly, a word that is pivotal to the domain in question and whose associative meaning is contested. The collocational profile drawn up on the basis of corpus evidence shows that elderly is primarily associated with discourses of care, disability, and vulnerability, emerging less as a marker of chronological age than of perceived social consequences. In addition to making a contribution to discourse-oriented aging research, the article also demonstrates the use of corpus linguistic methods within a sociolinguistic framework. (Ageism, ageist language, corpus linguistics.)*

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