On correlation of musical and natural languages: rock music and english

Abstract

The article deals with the points of intersection of musical discourse and national languages. This issue is relevant for modern linguistics, discourse studies in particular. The issue of the interpenetration of various discourse types over the last decade has been activated at all levels of the leading directions of the anthropocentric paradigm in academic research. Music and verbal language have repeatedly become the object of analysis and detection of semiotic interaction, but this has mainly concerned folk or classical music and folk songwriting. However, British rock music and English have been studied fragmentarily at the level of individual performers. The purpose of the article is to identify semiotic correlations between music and natural languages. The leading approach to studying the issue is a discourse analysis of empirical material at the level of terminology and prosody of sign functioning. A hypothesis is put forward that the worldwide success of British rock is due not only to the realization of the creative possibilities of talented musicians but to the specific structural and semantic features of the English language and British culture. The authors describe the synergetic elements of English phono-stylistics at the level of diphthong (triphthong) functioning, rhythmic prosody, melodic structures, versification mechanisms, and singing components. Several semiotic correlates of the verbal and non-verbal continuum of rock music and English have been identified. An important element of the discovered correlations is the belonging of musical and verbal discourses to the phenomenon of artistic creativity, in particular, the British historical and cultural tradition. The results of the study can be applied in further research in the field of synergetic correlation between three types of linguocultural substances: music, mentality, and national language.