EXPLORING SEMANTIC PROSODY AND COLLOCATION NETWORKS IN PAKISTANI AND AMERICAN ENGLISH SONGS THROUGH CORPUS APPROACHES

Abstract

The current study attempts to bridge the gap between corpus linguistics and semantics by exploring semantic prosody in the corpora of American and Pakistani English songs. The study is based on comparative analysis of the semantic prosodies of lexical patterns in the songs. To achieve the objective of the study, corpora of Pakistani and American English songs are developed and then similar words are extracted from the developed wordlists of the corpus. The study highlights the linguistic contexts encoded in the semantic prosodies of the selected lexical items in the corpora of American and Pakistani English songs. American songs were selected from American Billboard from the year 2000 to 2015; whereas, all the available Pakistani English songs from 2000 to 2015 were selected. Lancsbox was used to explore the semantic association of lexical items. The findings of the study reveal different interesting themes extracted from different lexical patterns and the difference in semantic prosodies of similar lexical items in both the corpora.