Pop song Lyrics through the Lens of Sociolinguistics. A case study of Bob Dylan’s Lyrics


Abstract


Pop song lyrics are unique communicative artifacts within contemporary culture on account of their distinctive semiotic properties, characterized as they are by a close relationship between music and words which imposes substantial constraints on text constitution and song structure, involving special rhetorical, rhythmic and phonic features, sometimes accompanied by some “poetic” (in Jakobson’s sense) stylistic devices. But lyrics are also unique for their ability to mirror many important themes of contemporary culture and capture socio-cultural moods and changes. This means that the language of pop song lyrics tends to be socially connoted and may bear traces not only of the author’s linguistic background, but also of diatopic and diastratic variation. This is why lyrics can be seen as ideal objects to be investigated by means of sociolinguistic analytical tools. This study aims at testing this idea, by applying a sociolinguistic approach to a case study, Bob Dylan’s song lyrics (1961-1970). In the article, an analysis of their most meaningful linguistic features is presented, discussing their phonological, morphological and syntactic peculiarities also in the light of quantitative data obtained through corpus linguistics. Their significance is discussed in the perspective of the artist’s linguistic identity, but also as documents of authentic usage of spoken AmE. The findings confirm that interesting results can be attained by taking a sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of pop song lyrics.

Keywords: pop song lyrics, sociolinguistics, Bob Dylan, text for music, American English

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