E nglish and G erman pop song lyrics: Towards a contrastive textology (2023)

Abstract: The present contribution offers a contrastive corpus-based analysis of English and German pop lyrics. It conceptualizes lyrics as a specific text type/register and tries to identify cross-linguistic commonalities and differences. As empirical base, it uses corpora that represent the lyrics of commercially highly successful pop songs in Anglophone and German contexts. Given the similar sociocultural functions and production circumstances of English and German lyrics, the study starts from the assumption that a large-scale linguistic overlap can be traced. While indeed cross-linguistic convergence is found especially for lexical patterns in terms of topic choice, the analysis also reveals a common property of conveying a conversational feel through lexicogrammatical means. However, given the differing typological make-up of the languages contrasted, fine-grained differences emerge as regards the ways conversationality/informality is established in pop lyrics as a performed text type.

## introduction pop music is a genre that has taken a foothold in germany at least since after the second world war. from a diachronic perspective, it emerges that at first it was very much an imported format with strong roots in anglophone societies such as the uk and especially the us. therefore, at the outset german pop performers (or rather imitators) largely sang in english @xcite , and, traditionally, the percentage of english-language lyrics has been high in the german pop charts, with estimations of more than 70% of all songs for the period 1965-2006, for instance @xcite . at the same time, german lyrics have been present in the german pop charts to a considerable degree and despite the global availability and spread of pop cultural artifacts, there is even evidence for an increasing divergence of pop music markets in more recent decades, fostering the recognition of domestic (i.e. german-language) music @xcite . thus, as pop music certainly has developed into a global art form, the question arises whether non-anglophone songs and lyrics may still show some orientation towards their historical "parent" in the sense of an american or at least anglophone art form. even though such relationships could be explored from various vantage points (e.g. musicology, ethnology, etc.), it is suggested here that it may be worthwhile to apply a linguistic perspective, as lyrics are a central part of almost all successful pop songs. while lyrics traditionally had been sidelined as a subject of linguistic research, the amount and scope of (corpus-based) work have been growing, especially in the past two decades, as illustrated in the followingby necessity selectiveoverview (see, e.g., @xcite for more comprehensive recent summaries). besides work on song translation (e.g. @xcite and early small-scale studies (such as @xcite ), analyses such as @xcite , @xcite or @xcite deserve mention in the area of english linguistics as they offer empirical assessments of lyrics as a register or genre, focusing on similarities to and differences of lyrics from other spoken and written text types and on (register-internal) dimensions of variation. occasionally, regional differences between lyrics are highlighted (e.g., @xcite . @xcite are to be credited for developing a contrastive analysis of different pop subgenres based on keywords, while there are also several studies with an explicit languageeducational concern (e.g. @xcite @xcite @xcite . by comparison, linguistic work on german pop lyrics has been scarce. noteworthy exceptions to this are (i) the publications by schneider and colleagues based on the songkorpus (see section 2), in which aspects such as the position of lyrics on a written-spoken/formal-informal cline @xcite ; see also @xcite , the discursive representation of socially salient topics in lyrics @xcite , or the occurrence of idioms @xcite are treated, and (ii) sociolinguistic work on german rap (e.g. @xcite @xcite , occasionally also involving a contrastive german-english perspective @xcite . 1 the foregoing review suggests that there has been increasing linguistic engagement with a focus on either english or german lyrics. however, what is largely lacking to date is a contrastive perspective that takes account of the fact that language usage is highly reflective of cross-cultural similarities and differences. to address this gap, the present study offers a contrastive view of german and english pop lyrics. more specifically, it conceptualizes lyrics as a specific text type/register and tries to identify commonalities and differences of this text type in both languages. it can broadly be situated in the contexts of cross-linguistic register studies (see, e.g., @xcite and contrastive textology (see, e.g., @xcite and employs corpora that represent the lyrics of commercially highly successful pop songs in german and anglophone contexts (see further section 2). given the similar sociocultural functions and production circumstances of english and german lyrics and their historical "parent-child" relation (see above), the starting assumption would be large-scale linguistic overlap. however, due to the differing typological layout of the languages involved, there may also be differences at a micro-level, for instance pertaining to how conversationality/informality is realized in pop lyrics as a performed text type. to address the aforementioned aspects, the present study will tackle the following research questions: the remainder of the present study is structured as follows: section 2 introduces the notion of "contrastive textology" and thus situates the present work as a cross-linguistic register analysis. it further presents the english and german lyrics corpora used. section 3 offers a situational analysis of lyrics discourse to establish basic principles regarding the communicative context surrounding this text type. while the preceding sections serve to pave the way for the analysis, section 4 contains the main results pertaining to lexical and phrasal (section 4.1) and lexicogrammatical (section 4.2) aspects, establishing areas of cross-linguistic convergence and divergence. the concluding section 5 serves to contextualize the overall findings and identifies areas for future research. ## approach and data as mentioned in section 1, the present study can be viewed as an instantiation of cross-linguistic (english-german) register analysis as conceptualized by @xcite . 2 specifically, it could be categorized as neumann's type 3, that is, as a study that "takes register as the main object of research […] with features [as] indicators used to characterize the contrastive registers" @xcite . such an approach facilitates the establishment of similarities and differences of the register/text type that is contrastively compared. while she acknowledges that there is no "optimal solution" @xcite when it comes to the cross-linguistic comparability of registers/text types, it is assumed that both english and german lyrics are sufficiently similar in terms of their genesis and usage contexts (see section 3) to permit a contrastive view. for examples of (non-contrastive) mdas of english lyrics, see @xcite or werner (2021a). in this regard, it is worth noting that the current study could also be seen as a contribution to what has been termed "contrastive textology" @xcite or "contrastive genre analysis" @xcite . the basic conjecture here is that "processes of cultural evolution can be described as discourse processes, in the sense that they are manifested in particular discourse practices and objectified in specific text types (genres)" @xcite . the main implications that follow from this perspective are (i) that relevant genres (such as pop lyrics) share properties cross-linguistically, while (ii) there may also be differences between individual speech communities (english vs. german pop performers), which altogether motivates a contrastive analysis. importantly for the current purposes, @xcite further implies that genre convergence is prominent in text types connected to everyday culture and especially in (mass-)mediatized texts that are potentially spread globally. therefore, he argues for the explicit study of such texts to overcome the bias toward exploring "high registers" (e.g. academic writing, press texts) in order to determine the actual presence of cross-linguistic similarities and differences (e.g. also in terms of the usage of nonstandard features) in genres subject to similar communicative conditions. pop music lyrics clearly qualify as a relevant text type in this regard (see section 3). a contrastive analysis of pop lyrics along the lines theorized in the foregoing passages requires representative corpus data. as lyrics, despite their potentially extensive social impact (see, e.g., @xcite , commonly are not available as parts of larger monitor corpora, their analysis has to rely on specially compiled corpora. in that regard, a fundamental question that may arise is that of how to define the "pop" in pop lyrics, also with a view to ensure cross-linguistic comparability as discussed above. the approach taken here follows precedence set in previous studies (such as @xcite @xcite ; see also @xcite and relies on commercially successful material that apparently possesses high appeal to a large audience. at the same time, it is worth noting that "pop" thus defined comprises a multitude of musical (and not necessarily textual) subgenres, which commonly are subjectively defined across various chart platforms, for instance. 3 the aforementioned commercial appeal can be operationalized through high-ranking chart positions, as is the case for the two corpora used for the present study. for english pop lyrics, it relies on an extended version of lypop, a corpus that has been used in several previous analyses with descriptive and applied foci @xcite @xcite @xcite . the current version of lypop contains all the lyrics from the top ten albums of the year-end charts from the period 2001 to 2021 as determined by the official charts company ( www.officialcharts.com ), a british music-industry related organization that compiles chart synopses based on the collection and analysis of record sales and information from streaming services. this corpus comprises 2,387 lyrics (745,287 word tokens/20,330 word types). 4 for german lyrics, the analysis relies on the "chart songs" (cs) section of the songkorpus ( www.songkorpus.de ). as already introduced above (see section 1), the songkorpus has served as empirical basis for several studies @xcite @xcite @xcite and is exceptional in that its data can be searched through an online interface. the cs section comprises the lyrics of successful german-language songs from the german top 100 single charts from the period 1970 to 2022 as determined by chartsurfer ( www.chartsurfer.de ), a website dedicated to providing various chart synopses. the cs section totals 1,962 lyrics (588,081 word tokens/30,005 word types). 5 despite minor differences in terms of compilation principles and temporal scope, it is evident that lypop and cs may serve as an adequate pair of resources for the contrastive analysis intended as they both represent lyrics of commercially successful pop songs in the respective languages and are of a comparable size. foot_5 ## situational analysis this section presents a succint overview of the situational characteristics of lyrics with a dual aim: first, to define the properties of the text type under scrutiny and to acknowledge the special character of lyrics as a performed, written-to-be-sung text type (see @xcite @xcite that has regularly been ignored in linguistic analysis compared to other registers; and second, to provide some more background on the issue of the comparability of english and german pop lyrics, as it is suggested here that they converge in terms of their genesis and usage contexts. follow the general framework for the description of situational characteristics provided in @xcite . ## conclusion the present contribution, which can be embedded into the larger context of contrastive textology/cross-linguistic register analysis (see section 2) was based on the premise that english and german pop lyrics as one instantiation of a performed text type are subject to similar contextual constraints and share a similar sociocultural and communicative purpose (section 3). therefore, a starting assumption was large-scale linguistic convergence, which was tested using a corpus-based approach. overlap indeed was traceable in the corpus data with regard to (i) salient content topics of the lyrics as well as (ii) usage of content verbs (section 4.1), which therefore could be considered "pop lyrics universals". lyrics from both languages also showed considerable congruence in the domain of register markers, notably the presence of (repetitive) non-lexical vocables. while the inventory of high-frequency items (e.g. na na na) was found to be similar, due their different phonological systems data from both languages also featured variation for other items (section 4.1). another difference at the lexical/phrasal level that emerged from the analysis of high-frequency trigrams pertained to the choice of verbs (mental verbs in english vs. forms of sein in german lyrics). further, it was hypothesized that there may also be differences at a micro-level, for instance as to how conversationality/informality is realized through lexicogrammatical means. the analysis of markers of informality and non-standardness suggested that both english and german lyrics attempt to convey a "conversational feel" through employing selected sets of relevant features, illustrating the presence of a performance filter as theorized in earlier work. these sets, however, were found to be diverging due to the differing typological structure of english and german, and fine-grained differences, for instance as regards contraction patterns in lexical and modal verbs (sections 4.1 and 4.2), could be identified. while the present study has provided a first contrastive insight into cross-linguistic differences and similarities of pop lyrics as a register, the scope of the data would allow several additional routes to be pursued in the future. these comprise a corpus-based contrastive look at cognitive aspects such as conceptual metaphors regarding high-frequency items like love/liebe, where a quick search of the present corpus data yields various patterns (e.g. love is… a losing game/a losing hand/pain/like a ship/dream/grain of sand/rocket/shadow/brick/ the sea/rain/fate vs. liebe ist… ein fluch/ein schild/eine sucht, etc.) that could be subject to further scrutiny as regards variation and linguistic creativity (see also @xcite . another aspect ignored in the present analysis relates to the presence of anglicisms in the lyrics. this may be especially worthwhile in view of the fact that german pop lyrics have been viewed as the "child" of an anglo-american cultural tradition (see section 1). relevant examples are given as ( 29 ) to ( 32 ). many of these examples are from rap and it could be further discussed whether they are instances of imitation of us rap as a "mother culture" @xcite to create genre-appropriate authenticity. notably, individual items have been adapted into the linguistic system of german, both as regards their capitalization as nouns (girls, deal, bitch-niggas, stage, shit, mood, outfit, shoelace) and as regards their adaptation into german morphological patterns (shaken, changt), at least as indicated by the transcriptions. on a related note, it may be worthwhile to explore the issues of multilingualism and language mixing/code-switching, as exemplified in ( 33 ) and ( 34 ). example ( 33 ) is trilingual as it involves german, english and turkish lyrics, arguably with the intent to create (rap) authenticity through establishing multiple cultural connections, crucially not restricted to an us-american one. alternatively, such examples could be interpreted as exemplifying "glocal" forces in rap (see, e.g., @xcite ). the german-english example (34), by contrast, illustrates language mixing for humorous purposes. further extensions of the present work are conceivable in terms of (i) developing more detailed quantitative and qualitative contrastive analyses of additional devices associated with informal conversation and strategic use to convey conversationality in written texts, such as discourse markers (e.g. you know/ich mein'), for instance @xcite , and (ii) considering aspects related to language education, for instance how lyrics as highly motivating input material could be exploited to introduce conversational grammar and to develop language awareness (see, e.g., @xcite @xcite . still, the preceding list is not exhaustive, so there will be many additional options to engage with the language of lyrics from a contrastive and other linguistic perspectives, with the present study serving as a possible point of departure. the availability of relevant corpus material (also going beyond the language pair english-german) will be crucial for such endeavors. as a final general note, it is argued that the present study also has illustrated the potential of "pop