Music and Discourse: Theoretical and Empirical Insights

Abstract

This special issue brings together research exploring both the language of music—particularly lyrics and sound—and the surrounding discursive practices that shape how music is discussed, interpreted, and experienced. It examines the diverse ways music communicates, offering novel theoretical and empirical insights into how meaning is produced across texts, genres, and contexts. Specific attention is given to areas where existing research remains limited, including the synchronic and diachronic analyses of musical texts and genres, the multimodal, multilingual, and contrastive perspectives, and the situated meanings and values of music creation, performance, and consumption. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches—such as corpus linguistics, discourse and genre analysis, translation studies, multimodality, phonetics and phonology, and applied linguistics—this issue seeks to advance our understanding of music as a linguistic, social and communicative phenomenon.