Email this article “I Remember when The Beatles Came”: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Women’s Musical Oral Histories
Abstract
Combining corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, this article examines the language used by American women of the Boomer generation to describe what it meant to listen to rock music in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on their first-hand accounts, the study focuses on the realisation of stance through which participants construct meaning and negotiate their positioning within a historically male-dominated cultural space. The findings reveal that they employ emotionally rich and evaluative language to articulate a nuanced affective stance, integrating personal investment with informed appreciation. This stance not only shapes their musical experiences but also serves as a means of resisting dominant, often stereotypical, models of fandom by foregrounding reflective, critical, and culturally significant forms of engagement. The study further demonstrates that incorporating corpus methods into oral history research can uncover specific linguistic patterns that might remain unnoticed in purely qualitative analyses. The article is relevant to the field of linguistics and may also be of interest to scholars in cultural studies, music studies, and memory studies.
References
Aleshinskaya E. 2013, Key Components of Musical Discourse Analysis, in “Research in Language” 11 [4], pp. 423-444.
Baker A. J. 2019, The Great Music City: Exploring Music, Space and Identity, Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Baker P. 2004, Querying Keywords: Questions of Difference, Frequency, and Sense in Keywords Analysis, in “Journal of English Linguistics” 32 [4], pp. 346-359.
Baker P., Gabrielatos C., Khosravinik M., Krzyżanowski M., McEnery T., and Wodak R. 2008, A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press, in “Discourse & Society” 19 [3], pp. 273-306.
Baker P. 2023, Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis, Continuum, London.
Bamberg M. and Andrews M. 2004, Considering Counter-Narratives: Narrating, Resisting, Making Sense, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Bennett A. 2009, ‘Heritage Rock’: Rock Music, Representation and Heritage Discourse, in “Poetics” 37, pp. 474-489.
Bennett A. 2015, Popular Music and the ‘Problem’ of Heritage, in Cohen S., Knifton Z., Leonard M. and Roberts L. (eds.), Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places, Routledge, New York, pp. 15-27.
Bennett A. and Rogers I. 2016, Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory, Springer, Berlin.
Berman G. 2007, “We’re Going to See the Beatles!”: An Oral History of Beatlemania as Told by the Fans who Were There, Santa Monica Press, Santa Monica.
Biber D., Conrad S., and Reppen R. 1998, Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Biber D. 2004, Historical Patterns for the Grammatical Marking of Stance: A Cross-Register Comparison, in “Journal of Historical Pragmatics” 5 [1], pp. 107-136.
Biri Y. 2023, Affective Stance as Positioning in an English-Speaking Online Fan Community, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 215, pp. 70-83.
Braber N. and Davies D. 2016, Using and Creating Oral History in Dialect Research, in “Oral History” 44 [1], pp. 98-107.
Braun V. and Clarke V. 2006, Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology, in “Qualitative “Research in Psychology” 3 [2], pp. 77-101.
Braun V. and Clarke V. 2013. Successful Qualitative Research: A Practical Guide for Beginners, Sage, Thousand Oaks.
Brookes G. and McEnery T. 2020, Corpus Linguistics, in Aijmer K., Adolphs S. and Knight D., The Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities, Routledge, London, pp. 378-404.
Brookes G. and McEnery T. 2024, Corpus Linguistics and Ethics, in De Costa P. I., Rabie-Ahmed A. and Cinaglia C., (eds.), Ethical Issues in Applied Linguistics Scholarship, John Benjamins Publishing, Philadelphia, pp. 28-44.
Bumsted A. 2024, TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism: Don’t Let the Name Fool You, Univ. Press of Mississippi, Jackson.
Cline, C. 1992, Essays from Bitch: The Woman’s Rock Newsletter with Bite, in Lewis L. A. (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, Routledge, London, pp. 69-83.
Cohen S. Men Making a Scene: Rock Music and the Production of Gender, in Whiteley S. (ed.), Sexing the Groove, Routledge, London, pp. 17-36.
Connell J. and Gibson C. 2003, Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Space, Routledge, Oxford.
De Fina A. 2003, Identity in Narrative: A Study of Immigrant Discourse, John Benjamins Publishing, Philadelphia.
De Fina A. 2009, Narratives in Interview—The Case of Accounts: For an Interactional Approach to Narrative Genres, in “Narrative Inquiry” 19 [2], pp. 233-258.
De Fina A. and Georgakopoulou A. 2015, The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, London.
Denis D. 2016, Oral Histories as a Window to Sociolinguistic History and Language History: Exploring earlier Ontario English with the Farm Work and Farm Life since 1890 Oral History Collection, in “American Speech” 91 [4], pp. 513-516.
DeNora T, 2000, Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Ehrenreich B., Hess E. and Jacobs G. 1992, Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun, in Lewis L. A. (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, Routledge, London, pp. 84-106.
Ewens H. 2020, Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture, University of Texas Press, Austin.
Feldman-Barrett C. 2021, A Women’s History of the Beatles, Bloomsbury, New York.
Fiske J. 1992, The Cultural Economy of Fandom, in Lewis L. A. (ed.), The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, Routledge, London, pp. 30-49.
Fitzgerald C. 2022, Investigating a Corpus of Historical Oral Testimonies: The Linguistic Construction of Certainty, Taylor & Francis, London.
Fitzgerald C. and Timmis I. 2024, Corpus Linguistics for Oral History, Routledge, London.
Friginal E. and Hardy J. 2013, Corpus-Based Sociolinguistics: A Guide for Students, Routledge, London.
Frith S. 1996, Music and Identity, in Hall S. and Du Gay P. (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, Sage, Thousand Oaks pp. 108-127).
Garrido S. and Davidson J. W. 2019, Music, Nostalgia and Memory, Springer, Berlin.
Gluck S. B. and Patai D. (eds.) 1991, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, Routledge, London.
Gramit D. 2016, Unremarkable Musical Lives: Autobiographical Narratives, Music, and the Shaping of the Self, in Pekacz J. Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms, Routledge, New York, pp. 59-178.
Hill R. L. 2016, Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music, Springer, Berlin.
Johnson B. 2013, I Hear Music: Popular Music and its Mediations, in “IASPM Journal” 3 [2], pp. 96-110.
Johnson B. 2018, Problematising Popular Music History in the Context of Heritage and Memory, in Baker S., Strong C., Istvandity, L. and Cantillon Z. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, Routledge, New York, pp. 13-25.
Kilgarriff A. Baisa V. Bušta J. Jakubíček Miloš, Kovář V. Michelfeit J., Rychlý P. and Suchomel V. 2014, The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On, in “Lexicography” 1 [1], pp. 7-36.
Larsen G. 2017, ‘It’s a man’s man’s man’s world’: Music Groupies and the Othering of Women in the World of Rock, in “Organization” 24 [3], pp. 397-417.
Lechner Z. J. 2018, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960-1980, University of Georgia Press, Athens.
Leichtman E. C. 2010, The Different Sounds of American Protest: From Freedom Songs to Punk Rock, in Deflem M. (ed.), Popular Culture, Crime and Social Control, Emerald Group Publishing, Bingley, pp. 173-194.
Lewis L. A. 1992, The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, Routledge, London.
Lippman J. R. and Greenwood D. N. 2012, A Song to Remember: Emerging Adults Recall Memorable Music, in “Journal of Adolescent Research” 27 [6], pp. 751-774.
Lipsitz G. 1990, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, NED-New edition, University of Minnesota Press.
Lucius-Hoene G. and Deppermann A. 2000, Narrative Identity Empiricized: A Dialogical and Positioning Approach to Autobiographical Research Interviews, in “Narrative Inquiry”10 [1], pp. 199-222.
MacDonald R. A., Hargreaves D. J. and Miell D. (eds.) 2002., Musical Identities, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Mangione L. and Luff D. 2017, Who Is Springsteen To His Women Fans? in Wolff W. I. (ed.) Bruce Springsteen and Popular Music: Rhetoric, Social Consciousness, and Contemporary Culture, Routledge, New York, pp. 114-130.
Martin J. R., White P. R. R. 2005, The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
McEnery T. and Gabrielatos C. 2006, English Corpus Linguistics, in Arts B. and McMahon A. (eds.), The Handbook of English Linguistics, Blackwell Publishing, London, pp. 33-71.
Mills R. 2019, The Beatles and Fandom: Sex, Death and Progressive Nostalgia, Bloomsbury, London.
Moore A. F. and Carr P. 2020, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research, Bloomsbury, New York.
Nikander P. 2012, Interviews as Discourse Data, in Gubrium J. F., Holstein J. A., Marvasti A. B., and McKinney K. D., The SAGE Handbook of Interview Research: The Complexity of the Craft, 2nd edn., Sage, Thousand Oaks, pp. 397-413.
Noy C. 2008, Sampling Knowledge: The Hermeneutics of Snowball Sampling in Qualitative Research, in “International Journal of Social Research Methodology” 11 [4], pp. 327-344.
Ochs E. 1979, Transcription as Theory, in Ochs E. and Schieffelin B. B. (eds.), Developmental Pragmatics, Academic Press, New York, pp. 43-71.
Partington A., Duguid A. and Taylor C. 2013, Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Pavlenko A. 2007, Autobiographic Narratives as Data in Applied Linguistics, in “Applied linguistics” 28 [2], pp. 163-188.
Pelletier M. A. 2015, Finding Meaning in Oral History Sources through Storytelling and Religion, in High S. (ed.) Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence, UBC Press, Vancouver/Toronto, pp. 332-350.
Perks R. and Thomson A. 2015, The Oral History Reader, Routledge, London.
Rhodes L. L. 2005, Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Roller K. 2015, Towards the ‘Oral’ in Oral History: Using Historical Narratives in Linguistics, in “Oral History” 43 [1], pp. 73-84.
Schiffrin D. 2003, Linguistics and History: Oral History as Discourse, in Erickson F., Chafe W., Labov W., Schiffrin D., Duranti A., Lakoff R. T. and Heath S. B., Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) 2001. Linguistics, Language, and the Real World: Discourse and Beyond, Georgetown University Press, Washington, pp. 84-113.
Sealey A. 2010, Probabilities and Surprises: A Realist Approach to Identifying Linguistic and Social Patterns, with Reference to an Oral History Corpus, in “Applied Linguistics” 31 [2], pp. 215-235.
Sealey A. 2012, ‘I just couldn’t do it’: Representations of Constraint in an Oral History Corpus, in “Critical Discourse Studies” 9 [3], pp. 195-210.
Sirhan N. 2014, Folk Stories and Personal Narratives in Palestinian Spoken Arabic: A Cultural and Linguistic Study, Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Southerton D. (ed.) 2011, Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, Sage, Thousand Oaks.
Summerfield P. 2016, Oral History as an Autobiographical Practice, in “Miranda” 12, pp. 1-15.
van Dijck J. 2006, Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory, in “Critical Studies in Media Communication” 23 [5], pp. 357-374
van Leeuwen T. 2012, The Critical Analysis of Musical Discourse, in “Critical Discourse Studies” 9 [4], pp. 319-328.
Way L. C. S. and McKerrell S. (eds.) 2017, Music as Multimodal Discourse: Semiotics, Power and Protest, Bloomsbury, London.
Wengraf T. 2001, Qualitative Research Interviewing. Biographic Narrative and Semi-structured Methods, Sage, Thousand Oaks.
Full Text: PDF
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
