Part of
Multi-Dimensional Analysis, 25 years on: A tribute to Douglas BiberEdited by Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano Pinto
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 60] 2014
► pp. 149–176
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
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.
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Cited by
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Berber Sardinha, Tony
2018. Dimensions of variation across Internet registers. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 23:2 ► pp. 125 ff. 
Climent, Salvador & Marta Coll-Florit
2021. All you need is love: metaphors of love in 1946–2016 Billboard year-end number-one songs. Text & Talk 41:4 ► pp. 469 ff.
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
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.
Moscatelli, Silmara Ribeiro & Paula Tavares Pinto
2022. Como ensinar espanhol para eventos? Uma proposta pedagógica baseada em corpus. Letras :62 ► pp. 35 ff.
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2016. A corpus linguistic study of the situatedness of English pop song lyrics. Corpora 11:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Motschenbacher, Heiko
2016. The Language–Identity–Normativity Interface and Critical Discourse Studies. In Language, Normativity and Europeanisation, ► pp. 51 ff.
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.
Squires, Lauren
2019. Genre and linguistic expectation shift: Evidence from pop song lyrics. Language in Society 48:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Werner, Valentin
2021. Catchy and conversational? A register analysis of pop lyrics. Corpora 16:2 ► pp. 237 ff.
Werner, Valentin
2021. Chapter 8. A register approach toward pop lyrics in EFL education. In Corpus-based Approaches to Register Variation [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 103], ► pp. 209 ff.
Wingrove, Peter
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