Group Proposal

Within our group, we have three Single Hons English Language students (Lauren, Jordyn and Meg); Single Hons English student (Olivia); and one Joint Honours Drama and English Language student (Jodie).

We have decided to focus our research project on the language used to convey love in correspondance between couples from various time periods. Although we will look at both the language and context of the love letters, our primary focus will be on the linguistic features used, and the pragmatics/semantics used in these texts.

After discussing the topic in depth, we have decided that it would be hugely beneficial to the project if we were to use a large quantity of primary resources - such as: letters exchanged between Lauren's grandparents in the 1960s; e-mails between Jordyn's friend and her boyfriend in Afghanistan; greetings card between Olivia and her boyfriend; as well as others sourced from literature (including the compilation 'Love Letters from Great Men', Robert Browning's Love Letter Collection) as well as researching love letters written by historical figures such as Henry VIII. These narratives will be important for analysis, but we also intend to use previous research on the topic (from academic writing and text books) to support our findings and provide us with extra knowledge on the subject.

The main areas we wish to study is the way that social context and etiquette of various eras has affected the language used in love letters; as well as how the concept of love has changed through time and whether this has had an effect on the language choices in correspondance.

Our main question will be either "A Study into the change that the language of love has undertaken through time." or something very similar - we have not yet decided on a definite question as we thought the entire group should be present to do this, but that is the general outline.

Firstly, we are going to choose 5 of the correspondances that we compile (to ensure that we each have one to concentrate on) and carry out a linguistic comparison between them. We plan to analyse them through data annotation, spider diagrams and venn diagrams to portray the similarities and differences between love letters from varying eras.

 We also plan to make a timeline to present some of our findings. These visual aids will also be backed up with an academic piece of writing (we are unsure at the moment how we are going to present this). We also need to organise our findings from past research through an in-depth literature review.

To build on the social aspect of our study, we intend to put together a video montage of the public's responses to various questions regarding the way that they communicate love through language. These are some of the questions that we are considering:

• "What do you associate with the term 'love letter'?"
• "If you had to write it, how would you tell someone how you feel about them?"
• "Have you ever sent a love letter?"

We also plan to put key words that we get from these interviews into word moodles in order to establish the things that people associate with the language of love.

On the day of the presentation, we intend to have a narrated powerpoint outlining our findings; a video montage playing; and a timeline depicting the chronological relationships between the sources that we have used; and some copies of our data for people to look through at their leisure.