Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

A corpus linguistic analysis of lyrics and suicide

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/bz60d4942

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  • Corpus linguistics studies involving lyrics continue to grow. While previous research has pointed to a positive relationship between certain personality traits and music types, the relationship between lyrics and suicide is understudied. As such, mental health researchers and practitioners have little sense of how the language of someone who has a high risk of dying by suicide differs from the discourse of one who does not. By providing some insight into how language in written expression might be utilized to determine suicide risk, this study hoped to aid therapeutic practice. This analysis has two arms: A and B. Arm A focused on the examination of word differences (keyness analysis) and word meanings (collocation analysis) in a corpus of song lyrics written by Kurt Cobain. For the keyness analysis the Cobain corpus was compared against a reference corpus of grunge music from the same time period. For collocation analysis, the word stems depress* and "gun*" as well as the word "death" were examined. Keyness analysis revealed a difference between words from Cobain’s lyrics and a reference corpus in the same subregister. Cobain’s lyrics showed a more frequent use of words related to acquired capacity. Regarding collocation analysis, the most frequent word in the corpora, “yeah”, most strongly collocates to itself. The second most frequent word in the corpora, “girl”, collocates with “ain’t.” The node word stem "depress*" and node word “death” did not produce any collocates. The node word stem “gun*” the strongest correlate was "shoot". Implications for utilizing these linguistic markers for suicide risk as an intervention will be discussed. Arm B's goal was to understand the differences between these two corpora in terms of 15 specific variables that fell into one of three categories: linguistic processes (1st person singular pronouns, 3rd person singular pronouns, 1st person plural pronouns, and 3rd person plural pronouns), psychological processes (positive emotion, negative emotion, anxiety, anger, sadness, risk, and death) and broad psycholinguistic processes (authenticity, clout, tone, and analytic). Of the broad psycholinguistic variables, the greatest difference between the corpora was tone followed by clout. There were multiple linguistic and psychological variables that differed significantly. These variables are first-person plural, third-person singular, and anxiety. By providing some insight into how language in written expression might be utilized to determine suicide risk, this study hoped to aid therapeutic practice.
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