Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis of Persian Lyrics

This article aims at analyzing and comparing Persian Pop Lyrics. In this research, a descriptive-analytic method is used, and the analysis is done according to Baker (2006) which is based on the integration of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. Independent variables are genre, gender of the lyricist, and time, and dependent variables are lexical differences including frequent words, keywords, and collocations. The hypotheses are as follows: there are significant quantitative and qualitative differences in lexical choices between two genres (social and love lyrics). Gender of the lyricist has a significant impact on lexical choices in the lyrics; Pre-revolution and post-revolution lyrics are significantly different regarding lexical choices. In order to answer these questions, a corpus of 1000 Persian Pop Lyrics has been analyzed by analytical tools of the corpus analysis software, Wordsmith, and SPSS. The results of this investigation are as follows: social and love lyrics have significant differences in terms of frequent words, keywords and collocations. Gender of the lyricist has a significant impact on the lexical choices in the lyrics. Also, the results show a significant difference between pre-revolution and post-revolution lyrics regarding the lexical choices. So, all of the hypotheses in this study are confirmed.