The concepts of “human”, “time”, “life” and methods of their representation in the Russian-language rap lyrics

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the semantic arrangement of rap lyrics. Based on the quantitative and statistical processing of the material, the author determines the lexical units that acquire a new functional purpose and conceptualization in the literary text. The goal of this research is to describe the functionality of the universal concepts of “human”, “time” and “life”, as well as the methods of their representation in the Russian rap lyrics. The relevance and novelty of this work are defined by the fact that despite the attempts existing in the linguistic science to determine the semantic and conceptual fields common to the lyrics of rap culture, this topic remains poorly studied within framework of interpretation of the Russian rap lyrics as a literary text. The concepts of “human”, “time”, “life” in rap lyrics manifest as the key indicator of the system arrangement of a literary text; and despite their universal nature, reflect the specific content, which is substantiated by communicative and stylistic peculiarities of rap. The conducted analysis of rap lyrics demonstrates that the concept of “life” can perform a leading role one in arrangement of the lexical-semantic space of the text, as it suggests a complex representation of social reality (time and space), life activities of the subject and their assessment, reflection on the new life and new people. The article employs descriptive method, contextual analysis, quantitative-statistical analysis, as well as the method of continuous sampling.