LOVE LANGUAGE AS A LINGUISTIC PHENOMENON: A MULTIMODAL COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF MARITAL AFFECTION AMONG OLDER AND CONTEMPORARY MARRIAGES

Abstract

Marital affection is central to relational intimacy, emotional bonding, and overall satisfaction in 
romantic partnerships. Yet the linguistic and semiotic mechanisms through which affection is 
communicated — particularly across generational cohorts — remain undertheorised in existing 
literature. This study examines love language as a multimodal and linguistic phenomenon, 
comparing affective communication practices in older marriages (20 years and above) and 
contemporary marriages (fewer than 10 years). Drawing on Gary Chapman's Love Language Theory 
and Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), data were collected from 20 married couples through 
a structured questionnaire capturing verbal affirmation, acts of service, quality time, physical touch, 
gift-giving, and technology-mediated communication, including text messages, emojis, voice notes, 
and social media interactions. The findings reveal that contemporary marriages demonstrate higher 
levels of expressive explicitness, with verbal affirmation and digital modes serving as dominant 
channels of affection. Older marriages, by contrast, favour semantically condensed, implicit forms 
— routinised acts of service, embodied co-presence, and non-verbal cues — shaped by shared 
relational history. Perceived emotional understanding remained consistently high across both 
cohorts, indicating that relational satisfaction is determined by semiotic alignment rather than 
expressive volume. Love language is not a fixed typology but a dynamc communicative system that 
evolves across relational time, redistributing meaning across linguistic, embodied, material, and 
digital modes. This study advances sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic understandings of intimate 
communication and carries implications for cross-generational relationship counselling in digitally 
mediated contexts.