ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the discursive means through which gerontology occupies the field and turns a possible into an actual area of study. It focuses on the integration and orderliness of the field. Every field must have the characteristic structure of a discipline lexicon directing a multiple organization of ordinary and other operative language elements of social life. The dialectic of scientific and everyday language is displayed in the other two mechanisms of field organization to be considered: specification and articulation. The work of specification is to grasp and pin down the subject matter of a field in stable grids of utterance. Specification plays a distinctive role in the organization of a field that warrants separate consideration. The chapter discusses the concept resonates obliquely in the metaphor of deficit accumulation. The role of metonyms is only to help draw out the latent models contained in metaphors: a subsidiary work of articulation and concretization.
