Classification of Song Discourse in Formal, Functional, and Cognitive Linguistics

The paper presents a classification of song discourse created on the basis of the formal, functional, and cognitive approaches to discourse analysis. The author explores existing discourse typologies and creates her own classification using the diverse discourse analysis studies by structuralists and poststructuralists. The text used as a source in the study are lyrics of songs performed by Elvis Presley in the 1950s – 1970s. The methods employed are synthesis and classification on the basis of structural and functional features of discourse. According to the formal approach, there are distinguished features of explicitness and implicitness, genre, semantic, stylistic, and discursive correspondence. The study introduces the concept of a system-forming metaphor (serving for a paradigmatic connection in discourse) and a local metaphor (used for a syntagmatic connection). According to the functional approach, the typology comprises aspects and categories related to the communicative-pragmatic component of discourse: place, time (synchronicity), progress, tonality and methods of communication, characteristics and relationships of addressees and addressers. The cognitive approach provides a typology based on the following: the presence of generally recognized attitudes, meta narratives, concepts, and their binary oppositions; the peculiarities of mental and context models represented in discourse; the presence of discursive frames, i.e., anticipations of key components (models) inherent in this discourse; the relationship between metaphors and gestalts (ways of forming concepts); the nature of interdiscursivity. The study introduces dichotomous concepts of interdiscursive interference (a conglomerate of several discourses creating an uncoordinated dialogue) and interdiscursive coherence (a combination of discourses in a well-coordinated dialogue).