Meaning and Metaphor - Assignment 12 James Madison University

Instructions -- NOTE DETAILS: SUBMIT A TYPED copy of the details of your project plan as described below. (PROJECT PARTNERS, PLEASE JUST PUT BOTH NAMES ON ONE PLAN.)
** Also, please either bring eight extra copies of your project plan for sharing in class OR email me your plan no later than 1pm on the due date for photocopying by the English Office. **
[This assignment will count as an ungraded assignment, AND a combination of acceptable effort/thought in the plan development and participation in class discussion on 11/6 will constitute 5% of your individual project grade.]

General guidelines for your project plan: Your project wil be a data study considering an issue or issues related to conceptual metaphor theory. Remember that this is your final project and is worth 30% of your grade for the course. Project partners should plan for both partners to participate equally in examining the corpus or corpora and drawing conclusions, though partners will ultimately each write up their own final project paper.

1. Describe the corpus/corpora you expect to examine, why you have chosen it, and how you will have access to it.
2. Describe the metaphor research question(s) you intend to explore with your corpus. Your research questions may but don't necessarily have to presuppose that conceptual metaphor theory is the best way to account for all linguistic metaphor! (If you have more than one research question, explain how they work together as single research topic.) TIP: In choosing one or more research questions, you should choose ones for which you think you can provide a preliminary answer to the next three questions.
3. What do you currently see as the range of possible answers you might get for those questions as you explore the data?
4. What data do you think you'll need to answer those questions, and why?
5. What procedures do you currently think you'll need to use for collecting the data to answer those questions?
6. Finally, map out a tentative timeline for your project including intermediate goals and the minimum number of hours expected per person, roughly per week, to reach those goals. You should also include either how you and your partner will coordinate your work and keep each other informed or, for those who have individual projects, how you and your class "partner" will give each other feedback on progress, data analysis, and conclusions. Keep in mind that you should have a decent preliminary summary of project results for the last day of class,though some changes might be made after that. Individual final papers aren't due until the Thursday of finals week (by 3pm at my office), so you don't need to factor those write ups into your timeline. :)