TCLC-Vortrag Sonja Böker — Song Lyrics in Quantitative Linguistics: What Numbers Reveal About A Genre

Popular music has only received little attention in quantitative linguistic research. Apparently, there are no public corpora of popular song texts. Therefore, I have compiled a corpus of French and English song lyrics based on online data banks for pop-like singing in churches. Over 1000 Praise and Worship song texts dating from 1975 to 2016 serve as the corpus for a register analysis (cf. Biber & Conrad 2011): Which lexico-grammatical and structural features does the genre have? For example, where are song titles found within the text body; which are the most frequent proper nouns and verbs; and which text types can be deduced from the use of personal pronouns? A second research focus examines differences between original French compositions and French adaptations freely translated from English compositions. This talk presents the first findings of a project addressing a research gap in quantitative linguistics.