In “Becoming You”, Joshua Rothman explains that “some people feel that they’ve altered profoundly through the years, and to them the past seems like a foreign country, characterized by peculiar customs, values, and tastes. (Those boyfriends! That music! Those outfits!)”, yet others, in contrast, “have a strong sense of connection with their younger selves, and for them the past remains a home” (2022). Our aim with this year’s BAAHE conference is to explore such ways of being and becoming across the life course – or “from womb to tomb” (Achenbaum 2014: 50) – in both linguistic and narrative spheres. How do language and storytelling function as tools of self-fashioning and identity negotiation in different cultural, historical, and linguistic contexts when it comes to age norms and ageist stereotypes? And how do 'age' and 'life course' – understood more metaphorically – help us study new facets of literary oeuvres and genres, of linguistic constructions and language change, of English language teaching methods and learner profiles?
By way of examples, we list below a number of themes and questions worth exploring under the two broad headers of 'language' and 'literature'.
Language
- Cognitive, functional and usage-based approaches have informed an emergentist alternative to innatist views relying on the notion of a self-contained language instinct (e.g. Tomasello 2005, MacWhinney et al. 2022). How do we better integrate child language corpus research in linguistic theorizing? And how can studies of child-directed speech (e.g. Jones et al. 2023) inform the study of child language itself?
- What resources and methods can be identified for the study of its counterpart – 'elderspeak' (e.g. Shaw & Gordon 2021, Erard 2025b)? How can we use (and adapt) existing linguistic approaches, such as Conversation Analysis, to language use in hospice situations (e.g. Gramling & Gramling 2019, Hoey & Pino 2024)?
- Age-graded variation in linguistic behaviour is a much-studied phenomenon (e.g. Labov 1994, Eckert 1997/2017, Buchstaller 2014). What constructions in English are typical of different life stages – not necessarily just of youth language, often focused on, but of other stages too?
- How does English work alongside other modes of communication online (e.g. Dancygier & Vandelanotte 2025), where so much of our interaction now takes place, and how do age and online media literacy interact?
- What stages of language change, grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification (e.g. Aitchison 1981/2012, Traugott & Dasher 2005, De Smet et al. 2023) can be distinguished in the study of specific English-language constructions? What data and methods can we deploy to include individual language users' role in such changes (e.g. Petré & Van de Velde 2018, Fonteyn & Petré 2022)? How does English compare, in terms of its overall grammaticalization profile, to other Germanic languages, and how can we better measure or assess this?
- How do we build the resources to broaden the scope of learner corpus research (e.g. Granger et al. 2020, Gilquin et al. 2010) to less well-represented learner groups, especially younger learners (e.g. Glaznieks et al. 2022, Werner et al. 2024), and what can we learn from this for language acquisition research and English Language Teaching?
- What forms and methods of English Language Teaching appeal more to, and/or work better, for different learner profiles – younger, advanced, adult, and so on?
Literature
- What do narratives evoking age and the lifespan reveal about sociocultural constructions of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and later life (e.g. Joosen 2015, Joosen et al. 2023, Falcus, Hartung & Medina 2023, Lipscombe & Swinnen 2024)?
- How do narratives targeted at adults represent childhood experiences (e.g. Caracciolo & Guédon 2016), and how do stories for young readers describe adulthood and old age (e.g. Joosen 2018)? Which constructions of ageism (e.g. Wohlmann 2023) and childism (e.g. Wall 2019) do such works reveal?
- How can forms of life writing such as memoir, autofiction, autobiographical novels, diaries, letters, blogs, sonic life narratives, digital storytelling, and social media (e.g. Gudmundsdóttir 2003, Schwalm 2014, Leader 2015, Novak 2017) contribute to our understandings of age and the life course? What about life writing and biographic reflections on literary careers (e.g. Lee 2009)?
- How can we research narrative depictions of past experiences across the lifespan (e.g. Nalbantian 2003, Otis 2022), and how can we examine these creative traces in personal and public archives (e.g. Zunshine 2022, Silva 2024)?
- How are narratives depicting the life course shared and received at different life stages and across generations? How can such narratives act as tools for healing and testimony during illness and end-of-life experiences (e.g. Charon et al. 2017)? What about the ethics of representing the self and others?
- How do narrative practices across genres and ages reflect, construct, and contest temporality and time experience in literature (e.g. Scheffel, Weixler & Werner 2014)?
- How have narratives depicting the life course been translated, circulated, and received across languages and borders? What about the shelf-life of translations and biographies of translators?
