Abstract
Pop-song lyrics are often felt to be highly stereotypical and cliched. The present paper is an exploratory attempt to shed light on the linguistic substance of these stereotypes and cliches by analysing the use of love-related metaphors in a pilot version of the Giessen-Bonn Corpus of Popular Music (GBoP; see Kreyer and Mukherjee 2007) within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Kovecses 2002). In particular, two questions are explored: 1) how much variation in the use of these metaphors do we find in GBoP, and 2) how creatively are these metaphors used in GBoP? The results are surprising in that pop songs show a fair amount of variation as well as creativity. The use of metaphors, therefore, cannot be regarded as the source of clichedness of pop song lyrics. On the basis of a brief comparison of the GBoP data with the poetry section of the British National Corpus, the paper suggests an alternative explanation along the lines of the Russian formalists' approach to poetic language.
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