A Corpus Linguistic Perspective on Contemporary German Pop Lyrics with the Multi-Layer Annotated “Songkorpus”

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 842–848 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 842 A Corpus Linguistic Perspective on Contemporary German Pop Lyrics with the Multi-Layer Annotated « Songkorpus » Roman Schneider Justus Liebig University Applied and Computational Linguistics Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10 D, 35394 Gießen / Germany roman.schneider@germanistik.uni-giessen.de Abstract Song lyrics can be considered as a text genre that has features of both written and spoken discourse, and potentially provides extensive linguistic and cultural information to scientists from various disciplines. However, pop songs play a rather subordinate role in empirical language research so far - most likely due to the absence of scientifically valid and sustainable resources. The present paper introduces a multiply annotated corpus of German lyrics as a publicly available basis for multidisciplinary research. The resource contains three types of data for the investigation and evaluation of quite distinct phenomena: TEI-compliant song lyrics as primary data, linguistically and literary motivated annotations, and extralinguistic metadata. It promotes empirically/statistically grounded analyses of genre-specific features, systemic-structural correlations and tendencies in the texts of contemporary pop music. The corpus has been stratified into thematic and author-specific archives; the paper presents some basic descriptive statistics, as well as the public online frontend with its built-in evaluation forms and live visualisations. Keywords: Corpus Linguistics, Under-Resourced Language Varieties, Pop Lyrics, German 1. Introduction Systematically compiled collections of written texts and speech form the most important empirical basis for linguistically motivated research on human language. Extensive data resources exist for standard and close-to- standard language varieties, supplemented by special corpora covering specific language situations and fields of application (Kupietz/Schmidt 2018, Lemnitzer/Zinsmeister 2015, Lüdeling/Kytö 2008, McEnery/Hardie 2012). Noteworthy against this background is the lack of scientifically valid, sustainably utilizable digital collections of pop lyrics, especially for the German language. Just as pop music has evolved from an originally youth cultural phenomenon in the nineteen-fifties and -sixties into an integral part of modern culture, its textual content has become omnipresent in the realm of everyday language. We are surrounded by pop lyrics, e.g. in the form of in-car radio listening, online streaming services, ambient music for department stores and restaurants, or in the context of television shows. Added to this is a somewhat lyrical claim: song texts can be categorized as "poetry of use" – the German term "Gebrauchslyrik" was introduced 1927 by Bertold Brecht and applied to song texts by Blühdorn (2003). They are "latently poetic, but rarely authentically poetic" (Flender/Rough 1989). Quite frequently, lyrics are not just consumed for the sake of distraction, but intended as a means of conveying messages and feelings, or – on the recipient side – as a medium to find inspiration and explanations at some point in life. In view of this considerably high "communicative impact factor" (Kreyer/Mukherjee 2007), there is a substantial desideratum regarding the consideration of pop lyrics as a separate genre in corpus linguistics. Though it is true that literary studies have discovered lyrics as …

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