Todinca Iasmina-Madalina

LMA,Engleza-Spaniola
Anul 3
Research Proposal

The lexical field of death

(A comparison between Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca and Chronicle of a Death Foretold
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

1. The topic

The research I propose to do for my BA paper is a study of the lexical field of death in two literary
idiolects which are Blood Wedding written by Federico Garcia Lorca in 1931 (and performed for the
first time in Madrid in March 1933) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold written by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez in 1981 in Colombia. The purpose of it is to realise the differences regarding the lexical field
of death during these periods and between these two different countries, Colombia and Spain, that
share the same language, the Spanish language.

2. Why this topic?

I chose this topic because in almost every culture, death is expressed differently and has different
connotations. Although is a very common subject, many people would rather not talk about it. Every
culture has its own specific rituals, customs, form of expression and explanation of death and I
thought that it would be interesting to compare these two books which are written in different
places (Spain and Colombia), in the same language (Spanish), but different periods of time (Blood
Wedding was written in 1931, during the Generation of 27’ movement, the pre-war period, while
Chronicle of a Death Foretold was written in 1981, in the post-war period).Hence, these two periods
could be easily contrasted one with another since the first novel was written before the war and the
other one after the war. The objective is to establish a differential and contrastive vocabulary of the
death lexicon of these two countries.

3. Methodology

 An introduction about the theory of Eugeniu Coseriu regarding linguistic variation will be
written by me.
 The words belonging to this lexical field will be grouped into different categories of lexems.
 They will be explained and discussed about when they are ought to be used.
 Finally, the lexical field of death from one of the novels will be compared with the other one
from the other novel.
Todinca Iasmina-Madalina
LMA,Engleza-Spaniola
Anul 3
Research Proposal

4. Working plan

The following stages and timelines will be observed in my study:

• Reading the two books:

-November 2017- January 2018

• Highlighting terms and expressions related to death:

-February 2018

• Looking them up in dictionaries:

-March 2018

• Organizing the findings and analysing their meaning:

-April 2018

• Writing up and revising the paper:

-May 2018

• Submitting the final version of the paper:

-June 2018

5. Ethical issues

Plagiarism is one of the main ethical issues in conducting research. Therefore, anything that I will be
using in my research paper (quotes from the two books for example), I will use quotation marks and
specify the author, year and the publishing house into a footnote at the bottom of the page.