The Language of Song: Some Recent Approaches in Description and Analysis

Abstract

Singing is an activity that happens in every society. But the ways that texts and music align with each other and the ways meanings are conveyed, and how the activity fits into larger contexts vary considerably from society to society. The study of song draws in not only the discipline of musicology but also many fields of linguistic inquiry*phonology, poetics, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. Like words and morphemes, songs are form-meaning units to be included in any complete language description. The papers in this volume reveal songs to be highly structured art forms that have the ability to convey complex associations of meaning beyond everyday spoken language. The papers arise from a workshop that aimed to explore the linguistic features of song in a cross-disciplinary context with a view to strengthening ties between linguists, musicologists and anthropologists working in this field.