A Study On Cohesive Devices Of English Popular Love Song Lyrics

This thesis takes English popular love song lyrics as the target of text analysis from theperspective of cohesive devices. Song lyrics texts have the quality of both oral and writtentext and can be regarded as oral text written for the purpose of singing. Among all kinds ofsongs, subject with love is probably the most common genre of song lyrics. Therefore thisstudy focuses on love song lyrics, specifically English love song lyrics. Love song lyricsreflect one’s feeling, emotion and sentiment and carry out the interaction among three relatedgroups of people: writers, singers and audiences. People use language to express one’sattitude and emotions.The analysis is from three aspects. At the phonological level, among all the soundpatterns, rhyme is the most frequently used, followed by alliteration and assonance. Othersound patterns like consonance and onomatopoeia are rarely employed. At the lexical level,there is a general preference to the specific form of lexical repetition---the most direct form,for the repeated words and phrases are usually the key words which can help us express richemotions. Lexical collocation is applied only when it is easy for association of certain lexicalitems that regularly co-occur, otherwise it may be difficult to understand. At the grammaticallevel, personal reference I, we and you are most preferred in this genre of discourse, which islargely because the discourse is often bilateral conversation. Substitution is the least usedamong the five types of cohesive devices. The most frequently used conjunctions are thesimple and familiar words and, so, but, only, because and or, which take on the characteristicsof oral English. The use of parallelism can make the focal points stand out, reinforce the tone,form the climax, thus it is especially appropriate to express intense and very passionateemotions. It helps to forcefully expose the theme of the song.Although the present thesis has studied the cohesion and analyzed some features ofcohesive devices in one hundred English popular song lyrics, due to the limited source of theselected data and the limitation of time, energy and the author’s knowledge, the result andconclusion of the thesis may not be universal, so it needs further research of professors. Andthe coherent features of popular love song lyrics can be studied further from the perspective ofcognition.