8. Pragmatic development in the (middle and) later stages of life

Age-related factors are not a very prominent topic in pragmatic research, yet there are many approaches that show how such questions can be productively addressed. The article begins by providing an overview of relevant theories and models from the fields of discourse (accommodation theory), language change and sociolinguistics, as well as from the neighboring fields of variational pragmatics and corpus pragmatics. Furthermore, in the sense of “lifespan pragmatics”, social roles of middle and higher adulthood, related questions of identity and the challenges of old age are presented. For older age, a separate section describes how the psycholinguistic theory of compensation can be applied to re-understand how the individual use of language continues to be adaptive until old age. The areas of gestures and prosody show the need to take possible physiological and cognitive changes into account. Related phenomena as pauses, interruptions and fillers are often labeled with the negatively connotated term disfluencies. Here, pragmatic research can contribute to a better understanding of communicative functions and adaptive abilities in later life.