A Study Of Song Lyrics

Linguistic researchers traditionally take spoken or written language as object of study, attaching little attention to language of song lyrics which is materialized via singing. This is a tentative study of the song language. The attempt is worthwhile in that song lyric is one of the most universal and influential forms of contemporary culture. Its universality can be found in both temporal continuance and spatial extension; its influence lies in its functions of emotion-expressing, entertaining, encouraging, comforting and educating etc. and in its independent value of literature as well. Besides, the study would render practical help for song writers, singers and listeners.Among different genres of language, poetry shares the most similarities with song lyric, the two stemming from the same culture resources though each developing in its own way. Modern song lyrics are apparently differentiated from poems in phonetic and orthographical features, degree of formality, ways of appreciation and so forth, thereby language of songs is viewed as "oral discourse written for singing".At present, studies of song lyrics are mainly confined to such non-linguistic areas as philosophy, aesthetics, literature, sociology, culturology and psychology. Studies from linguistic perspectives are scattered in phonetics, grammar, rhetoric, translation and teaching application, primarily based on traditional qualitative means with an apparent lack of real data. Corpus linguistic approach, now becoming the mainstream of linguistic study, gives quantitative and functional interpretations characterized by both structural induction and mental introspection. The thesis aims at similarities and dissimilarities of linguistic features between English and Chinese popular songs by means of corpus-based approach.Following Sinclair's basic principles of establishing a corpus, taking the advantage of cyber sources, a nearly 200,000-word bilingual raw corpus of 1000songs is constructed by way of stratified random sampling, with 500 in each language categorized in ten music styles. Then corpus analytical tool Concordance 3.0 is employed to investigate the data-based overall statistical properties of the two sub-corpora, and other linguistic features.As statistics show, the average piece length is roughly identical, approaching 200 words/characters in the two languages; repetition of Chinese characters indicated by token/type ratio is higher than that of English words; language for romance songs is the easiest with the highest repetition of words; the average word length for English songs is 4 letters, with over 70% words in less than 5 letters. Compared with the high-frequency wordlists of two standard corpora, the corpus of songs shares much in common, except that personal pronouns have significantly higher frequency. In terms of personal pronouns, the first and second-person pronouns have a majority and singular pronouns have a much higher frequency than the plural. Several semantic fields of images are prominent: seasons, colors, numerals, objective entities, animals, parts of human body and abstract conceptions. Quantitative descriptions are given for each field to disclose commonness and differences between oriental and western song themes and cultures. In addition, with collocation study growing into a hotpot in corpus linguistics, a pair of words love and SI, which has prominent and special position in pop songs, was singled out as the headwords. Facilitated by a series of formulas in calculating collocability of words, a case study of collocation is carried out. Lastly, from the perspective of discourse analysis, cohesion in songs is explored. Song lyrics are characteristic of deep reliance on phonology, repetition and parallelism, lexical co-occurrence, ellipsis and exophoric reference, and of few formal conjunctive elements. Apart from that, a small number of songs have the special cohesive devices as code switch and semiotic switch. Specific linguistic characteristics of songs in the above-mentioned aspects suggest that song lyric, as a rather less normal genre, is differentiated from other genres of language.Using corpus approach in song lyric language study is interesting and...