Abstract:

The article deals with song discourse as a speech genre. Song discourse is described as a social event, some special sphere that reflects social value, public settings, views, norms. The topicality of the research topic is determined by the importance of the use of songs in foreign language teaching. Song texts that are popular among certain environment (people of certain age, sex, nation, sphere, status) are considered to be valuable empiric material not only for a foreign language teacher, or a linguist, but a sociologist, historian, psychologist, philosopher to study the peculiarities of culture of the people, their ideology and philosophy, mentality, traditions, customs. Song discourse gives an opportunity to define social characteristics of a lingua-cultural community.

The article provided a survey of song discourse as song texts in aggregate with the context of their creation and interpretation. The research was aimed at description and analysis of song discourse having dual character – the unity of two components: linguistic and extra linguistic ones. Thematic specific of song compositions, their structure are referred to linguistic component. Some behavioral models and sociolinguistic features of discourse’s participants are referred to extra linguistic component. The research materials were the groups identified as «calls for action» in song discourse as lyrical one, event-driven and song. Each of the groups is characterized by a specific set of lexico-stylistic features and extra-linguistic characteristics. The total number of the texts under research is 46.

The research method was discourse analysis. It allowed to prove that song discourse among its functions such as poetic, reference and conative has such a significant one as educational which is realized in any institutional discourse; the cognitive study, to identify the most effective strategies to develop language creativity. To generalize, classify and interpret the results observed the descriptive method was used. As a result, the main characteristics of the English-language song discourse as ideology, subjectivity, creolisation, authoritarianism, distance, axiology, intertextuality, rituality, and polyfunctionality were revealed.

Moreover, the study showed the importance of further investigation in order to explain how the subsequent study of the song discourse allows to reveal various aspects of the interaction between language and society, as well as the basic mechanisms of identity construction.

Keywords:

Song discourse, speech genre, linguistic component, extralinguistic component, lexical and stylistic features, reference function, conative function.