A Stylistic Analysis of the Lyric Discourse:A Case Study of Tonight I Wanna Cry

Abstract:With American cultures penetration into all over the world, American country music becomes an indispensable part of people’s spiritual life gradually as one of the American popular cultures. This essay is going to analyze the song Tonight I Wanna Cry from the view of Functional stylistics, from the aspects of global and local, aiming at exploring their language model, motivated prominence and how they effectively express their style sense.

Key words:Lyrics, Stylistic Features, Global analysis, Local Analysis

1. Introduction

Tonight I Wanna Cry, which had ever reached the second place of the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs, is a country music sung by an Australian singer, Keith Urban. As a variety of English language, country music lyrics carry their own stylistic features. Traditionally, researchers always take the spoken or written languages as their subject of studying. Regarding of this situation, the author is interested in analyzing the stylistic features of American country song lyrics.

2. Global Analysis

2.1 Field of discourse

According to Halliday, the social context was composed by field, tenor and mode of discourse. Among these three factors, field of discourse is the linguistic reflection of the purposive role of the language user, ――the type of social activity the language user is engaged in doing in the situation in which a text has occurred (Xu Youzhi, 2005:32). It concerns the purpose and subject matters of communication, i.e. people’s intentions and topics of their speeches in various situations (Lyons, 1981:27). From the words “alone”, “wine”, “pain” we can infer the theme is typical love-losing. The whole lyric reflected an image of a downtown man who lost his lover and expressed his pain and regret.

2.2 Tenor of Discourse

Tenor of discourse is the linguistic reflection of the personal relationships between speaker/writer and hearer/reader――called personal tenor, and of what the user is trying to do with language for/to his or her addressee(s) ――called functional tenor (Xu Youzhi, 2005:36). Every communication involves two participants――sender and receiver. In this lyric, sender is the singer, and receiver is the audience. The audience can be the people who listens this music.

2.3 Mode of Discourse

Mode of discourse refers to the method by which the discourse conducted. It is the linguistic reflection of the relationship that the language users has to medium of communication (Xu Youzhi, 2005:35). Generally speaking, there are two methods to produce a discourse, speaking and writing. It is hard to say whether lyric is spoken language or written one. When printed or wrote on papers, we can say that it is a written one. Yet when sung by singers, it is typically a spoken language.

3. Local Analysis

3.1 Phonological Features

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language. Elision refers to a sound or sounds be omitted which was/were supposed to appear in a certain place, including aphesis, apo cope and syncope, which indicates that lyric is quite a informal and typically oral language. With the restriction of melody and tempo, aphesis is often used in song lyrics to express singer’s feelings as many as possible with limited words. In the text of the lyric, using of elision is very frequent, such as I’ll, I’ve, It’s, I’m.

Rhyme is the most popular and important method of syllable deflection. It refers to identity of sounds between words or verse lines extending back from the end to the last fully accented vowel and not further (Wang Shouyuan, 2000:94). Rhyme makes lyric smoother and easier for audience to remember. For example, the word “pain” and “rain”, “on” and ”gone”, “letter” and ”better” are the typical rhymes. It is obvious that rhyme is most important method to stress the effect of sounds which make s the whole lyric sounds smooth and easy to remember and sing.

3.2 Lexical Features

Country music is aiming at the wide spread to the worldwide. Considering this, lyric of song often be written with simple words to make it easy to understand and to memorize. In this lyric, oral words are highly employed, such as “house”, “TV”, “wine”, etc., making the lyric easily to be understood and convenient to spread.

Song lyric has aesthetics and poetry function. Lyrics arouse the author’s imagination to resonate and access to the enjoyment of aesthetics. To achieve this goal, the author of lyrics often use many rhetoric to make the lyric more poetic, such as simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allusion, , etc. In "To hell with my pride let it fall like rain ", we can see there’s only one rhetoric form――simile. It is a typical simile because there is the word “like”. Through this way, the author makes the abstract “pride” into a more specific image of “falling rain”.

3.3 Syntactic Features

In order to achieve the good effect of communication, lyric author usually use the short sentences, interrogative sentence, elliptical sentence, parallelism, repetition, inversion, loose sentence, and periodic sentence, etc. The frequent using of interrogative sentences narrows the distance between singer and audience, draw the audience’s attention and curiosity, expecting them to resonant. In this lyric: "Would it help if I turn a sad song on", it is an interrogative sentence without a question mark which makes the audience feel they are involved in.

4. Summary

Generally speaking, by applying the theories of stylistic, the paper attempted to explore the stylistic features of the lyric of the song, tonight I wanna cry from the aspect of global analysis and local analysis. Through this way, we can know more about the stylistic features and understand the meaning of the lyric.(作者单位：西南财经大学 经贸外语学院)

References

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［2］ 王守元. 2000. 英语问题学要略. 济南: 山东教育出版社

［3］ 徐有志. 2000. “现代文体学研究90年.” 外国语