Discoursive construction of the «sandwich generation» in English and Chinese: a corpus-driven study

Against the backdrop of global demographic ageing, individuals who simultaneously provide care for elderly parents and support their own children (the "sandwich generation") – find themselves at the centre of socio-economic challenges. This study presents a comparative corpus analysis of media discourse aimed at identifying the linguistic mechanisms for representing the concept sandwich generation / 三明治一代 in English-speaking (USA, UK) and Chinese linguacultures. The objective is to demonstrate how linguistic means not only describe but also constitute the social experience of a generation bearing financial and emotional responsibility for both younger and older generations, thereby shaping culture-specific models for understanding this issue. The research is based on a specialised bilingual text corpus (approx. 450,000 tokens) and utilises corpus linguistics tools (Sketch Engine). The results reveal a contrast between the financial-pragmatic model of English-language discourse, which operates with collocations of managed stress and institutional solutions, and the normative-existential model of Chinese discourse, saturated with cultural codes, historical formulae, and idioms of total exhaustion. The study contributes to the fields of linguaculturology and discourse analysis by demonstrating how language shapes unique scenarios for perceiving a universal social phenomenon

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