A Stylistic Analysis On English Musical Lexicon In Music Criticism

This thesis attempts to investigate the lexical features of musical language, with the stylistic features and lexical stylistics as theoretical supports and 120 texts(including 25769 vocabularies) from CD booklets as research object so as to have a deeper interpretation of musical lexicon features from different aspects.The thesis is divided into five parts: the first chapter introduces the research purpose and significance, as well as the background and the research focus. The second chapter reviews the related research and achievements at home and abroad in terms of stylistics, music criticism, and the relationship between English music criticism and ESP teaching. The third part delineates the theoretical support of the thesis, displaying the concept of style and stylistic analysis, the study of lexicon and stylistic features of English lexicon. As the foremost part of the whole thesis, Chapter Four consists of discussions of common words, common words with musical meaning, technical terms and the conversion between musical terms and common words, analyzing musical lexicon features through data comparison and interpretation by means of the standard of token, type and family member statistics and previous study of word frequency count after putting forward the research questions, objects and procedures. Affected by the origin, convention and development of western classical music, abundant adoption of loanwords has become one of the major characteristics of musical lexicons, not only appearing in music criticism texts, but also frequently displayed in musical scores, reflecting musicians’ composition intentions and expressions of emotion.The thesis further analyzes those Italian, German and French loanwords which often appear in music comments, to account for the use of loanwords in music from the historical background. In addition, the thesis also examines the vocabulary from different aspects of reviewers, composers, music styles, and historical periods, to show the characteristics of specialty, proficiency and diversity of musical lexicon. The last part of the thesis provides a brief summary for the main findings of the research, and, according to the current situation of musical English teaching at home, a glossary of frequently used musical English words is listed for students in musical college and classical music lovers, in the hope of enriching the musical vocabulary and enhancing their ability to comprehend great musical pieces.The results of this investigation reveals the stylistic features of the English musical lexicon in music criticism, that is, common words are mainly selected and widely adopted in music criticism, collocated with a certain amount of musical terminology, common words with musical meaning and loanwords, rendering the whole language of music criticism more approachable to being accepted and understood in terms of professionalism in general. At the same time, this investigation helps shed some enlightenment to musical English teaching, assisting music learners to attain, by mastering the basic musical vocabulary, a profound comprehension of the great pieces and more accurate explanations of technical terms highly recurring in music scores. Meanwhile, the thesis helps the music lovers read and comprehend the original version of music criticism text to obtain the true connotation and emotion that famous composers intended to express.