Article published in:
Multi-Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on: A tribute to Douglas Biber
Edited by Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano Pinto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 60] 2014
► pp. 149–176

Chapter 2.2 Multi-Dimensional analysis of pop songs

| State University of Rio de Janeiro
This chapter reports on an MD analysis of North American and British pop songs from 1940 to 2009, comprising 6,290 individual songs from 32 artists and bands, representing 16 different music styles or genres. The corpus was automatically tagged for part of speech and semantic field. In addition, multi-word units in each song were identified and checked both against the Google 1 trillion word 3-gram corpus and against the whole song corpus in order to measure the use of formulaic language. The principal component analysis showed two sets of three factors, one for lexico-grammar and one for semantics. These were interpreted as dimensions, and the most representative songs, artists, styles, and time periods for each dimension were identified. Overall, this study advocates the relevance of song lyrics as an object of linguistic investigation.
Published online: 31 July 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.60.05ber
References

References

Bértoli-Dutra, P.
(2002) Explorando a linguística de corpus e letras de música na produção de atividades pedagógicas [Corpus Linguistics as a tool to develop teaching activities based on song lyrics]. (Unpublished master’s thesis). São Paulo Catholic University, São Paulo, Brazil.Google Scholar
(2010). Linguagem da música popular anglo americana de 1940 a 2009 [The language of Anglo-American popular music from 1940 to 2009]. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). São Paulo Catholic University, São Paulo, Brazil.Google Scholar
Biber, D.
(1988) Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Biber, D. et al. (
1999) Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Brackett, D.
(2000) Interpreting popular music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brants, T., & Franz, A.
(2006) Web 1T 5-gram corpus version 1.1 (Corpus). Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Charlton, K.
(2008) Rock music Styles: A history. Boston: MacGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Crossley, S.A.
(2005) Metaphorical conceptions in hip-hop music. African American Review, 39(4), 501-512.Google Scholar
Frith, S.
(1993) Music and identity. In S. Hall & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 108-127). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Griffiths, D.
(2003) From Lyrics to anti-lyric: Analyzing the words in pop songs. In: A.F. Moore (Ed.), Analysing popular music (pp. 39-59). Cambridge: CUP.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hall, S.
(1993) The question of cultural identity. In S. Hall, & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 596-634). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Kreyer, R.
(2012) Love is like a stove – It burns you when it’s hot. A corpus-linguistic view on the (non-) creative use of love-related metaphors in pop songs. In S. Hoffmann, P. Rayson, & G. Leech (Eds.), English corpus linguistics. Looking back, moving forward. (pp. 103-115). Amsterdam: Rodopi.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kreyer, R., & J. Mukherjee
(2007) The style of pop song lyrics: A corpus- linguistic pilot study, Anglia, 125(1), 31–58. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Middleton, R.
(1990) Studying popular music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, A.F.
(2003) Analysing popular music. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Murphey, T.
(1990) Song and music in language learning: An analysis of pop song lyrics and the use of song and music in teaching English to speakers of other languages. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Olivo, W.
(2001) Phat lines: Spelling conventions in rap music. Written Language and Literacy, 4(1), pp. 67–85. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, R.. (
et al. 1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. LondOn:Longman.Google Scholar
Starr, L., & C. Waterman
(2007) American popular music: From minstrelsy to MP3(2nd Ed.). Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Straw, W.
(1993) Popular music and postmodernism in the 1980’s. In S. Hall & P. Du Gay (Eds.), Questions of cultural identity (pp. 3-21). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Werner, V.
(2012) Love is all around: A corpus-based study of pop lyrics. Corpora, 7(1), 19–50 CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Winkler, P.
(2000) Randy Newman’s Americana. In R. Middleton (Ed.),Reading pop: Approaches to textual analysis in popular music (pp. 27-57). Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by other publications

Berber Sardinha, Tony
2018. Dimensions of variation across Internet registers. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 23:2 ► pp. 125 ff. Crossref logo
Costa, Andressa
2020. Biber, Douglas; Egbert, Jesse. 2018. Register Variation Online. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316388228.. DELTA: Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada 36:2 Crossref logo
Kobayashi, Yuichiro, Misaki Amagasa & Takafumi Suzuki
2017. Investigating the Chronological Variation of Popular Song Lyrics ThroughLexical Indices. Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities 2:1 ► pp. 90 ff. Crossref logo
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2016.  In Language, Normativity and Europeanisation, ► pp. 51 ff. Crossref logo
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2016. A corpus linguistic study of the situatedness of English pop song lyrics. Corpora 11:1 ► pp. 1 ff. Crossref logo
Sardinha, Tony Berber, Carlos Kauffmann & Cristina Mayer Acunzo
2014. A multi-dimensional analysis of register variation in Brazilian Portuguese. Corpora 9:2 ► pp. 239 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 november 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.