Coupland et al. (1989) proposed the meaning and function of age-disclosure through the investigation of the discourse from elderly people. Following but distinct from theirs, the present study enriches the interpretation of age-disclosure through the investigation of the discourse from young people and further enhances the understanding of age in medical context in the following three directions: (1) Age is a point of reference of a patient’s disease trajectory (e.g. age at diagnosis). (2) Age is a point of reference of a person’s life course (i.e. Different age groups correspond to different stages of physical development and different life goals). (3) Age is the reason for denial when a patient is faced with a disease that is out of his/her expectation because of the violation of the normally assumed physical development.
Besides, the present study opens up a new way to understand Taiwanese cancer patients’ psychosocial characteristics through the Internet by employing a linguistic approach. Thus, in terms of linguistics, the present study provides future studies with new directions for topic selection, for example, to look into discourse taken from online social
media (i.e. online discourse analysis) and to look into medical-related topics. From the perspective of health care, online social media are valuable sources of patient voices and the combination of linguistic approaches and health-related topics allows researchers to look into the same topic from different angles and thus gain different insights.
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