A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Metalanguage In Bob Dylan's Lyrics

The issue of metalanguage is an open field researched by multiple academic disciplines,such as philosophy,logic,linguistics,literary and so on.The concept of “metalanguage” is initially proposed by philosophers and logicians,who define metalanguage as the language used to talk about language,hence here arises the relative concept—“object language”,the language being talked about.The distinction between metalanguage and object language has been widely accepted by different academic fields,including linguistics.Linguistic generally studies metalanguage from two approaches.The first approach focuses on technical metalanguage,attempting to generalize a set of precise metalanguage by delicately distinguishing semantic structures of metalanguage from the perspectives of semiology or structural semantics;meanwhile,some linguists inspired by that are dedicated to examine linguistic terminologies so as to improve the precision of the theoretical system of linguistics.On the contrary,the second approach pays attention to non-technical metalanguage,viz.,a variety of metalanguage expressions in daily communications or in literary works,which have attracted attention of scholars from pragmatics,stylistics,etc.However,previous linguistic studies generally made discursive descriptions on metalanguage's function,which on one hand lacks a systematic view and on the other hand ignores some more interesting aspects of metalinguistic narration,say,sociocultural elements.The study,aiming to explore the relationship between metalanguage and ideology in narrative literature,is based on the metalinguistic texts in American singer Bob Dylan's lyrics collection from 1961 to 1979,which contains a large amount of metalinguistic texts with the information of culture and ideology as well as great stylistic significance.The study,by means of the Critical Discourse Analysis with combination of the Appraisal Theory,analyzes the narrator's metalanguage from three categories: the metalinguistic texts to the narrator's utterances,the metalinguistic texts to the characters' utterances and the metalinguistic texts to the language facts.Then it interprets the corresponding attitudes reflected by the metalinguistic texts of each category and explains the sociocultural ideologies underlying metalanguage.The study finds that the narrator's attitudes are characterized with negative affect and positive appreciation in the metalinguistic texts concerning the narrator's utterances,the narrator's attitudes are characterized with negative affect and negative judgement in the metalinguistic texts concerning the character's utterances,and the narrator's attitudes are characterized with negative appreciation in the metalinguistic texts concerning the language facts.Those generally negative attitudes reflect the intense strife between the ideologies represented by the hippie culture and the mainstream culture in America from the 1960 s to the 1970 s.The thesis suggests that metalanguage as an essential stylistic feature in narrative literature is an important mirror of sociocultural ideologies of a literature work and the narrator's attitude is the bridge linking metalanguage and ideologies.In the end,the thesis proposes a desirable framework of Critical Discourse Analysis based on systematic linguistic methodology,which can conduct an effective analysis of metalanguage,narrator's attitude and ideologies in narrative literature,and it also provides the sociolinguistic perspective to the studies of metalanguage.