The Change Of Style In Chinese Popular Song Lyrics

Popular songs are closely related to people's daily life. Popular song lyric has also been a concern for the linguists because of its distinctive characteristics of language. However, being attached to music, it is called the "unfinished art form" and thus has not developed an independent status of its own. In this way, it usually can't be assigned to the category of literature.Stylistics, as a subject established since the 1960s, has experienced a passage full of ups and downs. As one of the core theories of stylistics, due to its workability and flexibility, the theory of deviation still has a forceful interpretive capacity in illustrating texts and therefore becomes the focus of extensive studies from home and abroad. However, most of the theoretical and empirical studies of this theory restrict themselves to literary texts, paying very little attention to non-literary ones. And the theory is more often applied to linguistic levels with non-linguistic ones being overlooked. These all impede the theoretical development and application of the theory to a certain degree.This thesis attempts to probe into the deviation phenomenon of popular song lyrics with the theory of deviation, hoping that on the one hand, reasons for their popularity which may be of some guiding significance of lyric writing could be found; and on the other hand, the theory itself could be deepened and refined through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the popular love song lyrics. By selecting two representative groups of songs in different periods of time, some hidden cultural connotations may be revealed, too.The whole thesis will be divided into five chapters including Introduction at the beginning and Conclusion in the end. In the Introduction part, the background and significance of the study are stated and the main ideas of each part of the study are presented. Chapter Two mainly introduces previous studies with regard to style, stylistics, deviation and popular love song lyrics. Chapter Three provides the theoretical framework of this study, which are, Leech's famous classification of deviations on linguistic levels and the extended theories of non-linguistic deviations. In Chapter Four, following a brief introduction to the methodology and data collection, different types of deviations are analyzed and findings of the study are discussed. Through the discussion, the following two points can be obtained. First, there are large quantities of deviation in popular song lyrics and such deviations are one of the important means of popular song lyrics' gaining popularity. Second, though deviation is realized through language, factors of the material society, psychology and culture also account for its occurrence. In the final chapter, conclusions of the analysis are drawn and implications of the study are pointed out. Limitations of the study as well as suggestions for future research are also listed.