Musicolinguistic Approaches to the Study of Song

A comprehensive study of song invites a broad range of approaches including but not limited to ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, choreology, gesture studies, cognitive science, history, cultural studies, poetry, folklore, literature and linguistics. While the more obvious (and perhaps visible) contributions of linguistics to song are in terms of investigating songtexts, there are also contributions to be made from interactional, multimodal, poetic, performance-based and anthropological approaches to language and from the margins between these approaches and ethnomusicology. In this paper, I argue the case for musicolinguistic and performance-based approaches to song that combine the insights and methods of embodied, interactional and anthropologically grounded linguistics and folklore with rigorous musical analysis and attention to the cultural and wider social and historical context. There is already a broad paradigm of scholarship in this vein and here I attempt to outline the various approaches and the most useful aspects of them for researchers of song.