- 期刊
Critical Discourse Analysis about Bob Dylan's Lyrics
摘要
Bob Dylan is a famous folk musician and social activist in the 1960s. At the same time, as an excellent songwriter, Dylan's lyrics creation is deep and meaningful. His songs have received much attention from all over the world. As music can also be viewed as a discourse, this study adopts critical discourse analysis to investigate how music discourse influences people's thinking. Considering that corpus linguistics approaches can improve the objectivity of critical discourse analysis research, thus resulting in a more robust and valid set of findings, this paper employs a mixed research method. For this purpose, a corpus of 369 Bob Dylan's lyrics published from 1961 to 2012 was searched. This article analyzes the lyrics of these songs with corpus linguistics and discusses the social meaning behind them with social events, social practices, and social structures as the three layers outline which are from Fairclough's critical discourse analysis. Results show that "traveling", which can be seen as a rebellion against the world, is an important theme of Bob Dylan's writing. He always uses low‐modality verbs to shorten the distance between him and his listeners. Society influences his work, and in contrast, many people was influenced by his songs.