RSEL Meeting Number 3: Minutes
In today’s
meeting, we used headers to structure the discussion and come to clear
decisions on what our next progression is. Below is a written form of our
discussion.
What is the question?
What
linguistic changes are apparent when comparing love letters from eras between
the 16th century and modern day?
What time periods will our data derive
from?
Our first
letter will be from the 16th century and is an exchange between King
Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Letter number two will be from the early 1980s
from a man to his bride-to-be the week before their wedding. The third letter is from the 1960s and is a
correspondence sent during a long-distance relationship from Manchester to
London. The fourth letter is from Ludwig van Beethoven to his ‘Immortal Beloved’.
This letter is not provided with a year, but it is assumed that it was written
between 1790 and 1827. Finally, we have a modern day email/blog from a man in
Afghanistan to his girlfriend back home in England.
What aspect of language will each
person in the group focus on?
Jodie –
Grammar
Jordyn –
Pragmatics
Meg – Lexis
(with a sub-heading of vocatives)
Lauren –
Social Context
Olivia –
Phonology
What do we need to do before the next
meeting?
- We have agreed that we will each make 5 copies of our excerpt so that we can all do our own analysis on the sheet.
- We need to try to find books in he library or online that can be used in the literature review.
- We must consider ethical issues (although this can be done together in our next meeting).
Notes:
After
annotating the data, we will create a literature review.
We have also
decided not to do the video recordings as part of our research so that we have
time to focus on other, more important, aspects of the project.
NEXT MEETING:
TUESDAY 23RD OCTOBER @ 4PM
More good work, and an interesting set of data. It's rather a mixed bag, so you won't be able to make general claims on the strength of what you find - though you might be able to relate your indivudal texts to what you find in the literature on general characteristics of the genre. Also, Mel Evans may have some ideas - she's researched the letters of Elizabeth I. Good progress.
ReplyDeleteHi folks - fascinating project in the works here (my ears were burning). If you're still trying to determine what exactly to look at in the letters, you might find Terttu Nevalainen's work on the language of Henry VIII correspondence (and Early Modern letters more generally) useful. There is a paper she gave at Cambridge here (http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1186321) and her article 'What's in a Royal Letter' (2002) is also relevant (I can email you a PDF is required).
ReplyDeleteYou might also want to think about: the diachronic distribution of your texts (i.e. which periods of history do they represent? How representative are the texts of their sociolinguistic period?); the social backgrounds of the author and addressee (e.g. soldier to girlfriend very different to King and future Queen of England!) and the social relationship between them (i.e. is one superior to the author) on the types of langauge used; the norms/technologies of correspondence at each period; and perhaps the authenticity of the linguistic data (e.g. is the letter by Beethoven a translation? Did your authors actually write the letters themselves, or did scribes/secretaries do it for them).
Happy to help with any other pointers if you need them - lots of potentially-relevant books in my office!
Hi Mel! Thank you so much, if you could send me that PDF, that would be brilliant! (MXE153@bham.ac.uk) When are your office hours, and could we maybe pop in and look at a couple of books? Finding it quite hard to find background reading at the moment. Thank you!
ReplyDeleteHi Meg (and rest of group),
ReplyDeleteI'll send you that PDF asap. And my office hours are Mon 4-5 and Tuesday 2-3. Happy to provide suggestions.
One other thing: I'm very intrigued how you're going to discuss phonology, based on written texts...