Language and Speech Features of Songs by Popular American Rock Artists

The present research responds to the growing research interest in the corpus lyrics study, since music plays an important role in the life of society. Although songs convey various messages, they are not complete without the language system embedded in the lyrics. Previous works on song analysis have attempted to establish the significance of music for human’s worldview through corpus linguistics (R Kreyer, J Mukherjee, H Motschenbacher). Music depict changes, therefore, the purpose of the study is to identify linguistic features reflected in the rock music through quantitative and qualitative approaches using corpus methods. Six American rock groups (“Imagine Dragons”, “Twenty One Pilots”, “OneRepublic”, “The Killers”, “X Ambassadors” and “Panic! At the Disco”) have been selected on the basis of their popularity and common audience of listeners. The linguistic tools of forming meanings reflect the essence of the rock bands under study. The analysis of the corpus demonstrates the influence of the chosen musical genre on the human picture of the world: the work determines the emotional color of the studied texts, which provides a positive or negative impact on the listener. For instance, the analysis reveals that after the neutral-colored vocabulary there are words with a positive connotation. This means that most topics do not contain a hostile character and do not have a negative effect on listeners. On the contrary, these texts show the listener a situation from a different angle. This research has contributed to the study of musical discourse and may be of interest to musicians, songwriters, composers, teachers, translators, psychologists and journalists of music channels.