‘People with Disabilities,’ ‘Disabled People,’ or ‘The Disabled’: A Corpus Analysis of Disability Labeling Constructions

The way language shapes perceptions about disability is a complex and long-debated topic within popular disability discourse. With the rise of “person-first” language in recent decades, this debate has shifted toward a grammatical, rather than lexical one, contrasting forms such as people with disabilities, disabled people, and the disabled. While these different construction types—prepositional, attributive, and nominalized, respectively—refer to the same entity, the purported connotations of each have been highly contested. Despite this, research on the topic has been limited and mixed, particularly for studies focusing on actual usage. By analyzing these constructions in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study identifies factors contributing to the variable usage of each construction type, including disability type, referent age, and text genre. The results show that usage varies significantly between constructions using disability modifiers and those using non- disability ones (e.g., mentally ill versus powerful), as well as between different disability types (e.g., mentally ill versus epileptic). This varies further depending on whether the referent is a child or an adult. In addition, in formal contexts, prepositional labels are more likely to be used than nominalized ones. While, overall, this variability was relatively stable for nominalized constructions between 1990 and 2019, prepositional usage has increased over this period. By demonstrating how construction usage is context-dependent—sometimes in ways that challenge popular expectations—this study highlights the importance of usage- based, sociolinguistic research in the analysis of disability labeling constructions and the types of social meanings they index.