Speaker
Description
Song lyrics, though widely used in language classrooms, have rarely been studied through a corpus-linguistic lens. This study examines the lexical and semantic characteristics of two consecutive Taylor Swift albums — The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD, 2024) and The Life of a Showgirl (TLAS, 2025) — which differ sharply in emotional tone despite being released just one year apart. Although both albums have received considerable critical attention, no published study has yet analyzed them using corpus methods, leaving their lexical and semantic profiles empirically undescribed. The complete lyrics of both albums, comprising 43 songs and approximately 28,000 tokens, are compiled into a corpus and analyzed through three methods: lexical bundle analysis based on Biber's theories to identify and functionally classify recurrent multi-word sequences; semantic field tagging using USAS in Wmatrix 4 to examine the distribution of emotional, evaluative, and relational semantic fields; and keyword analysis using log-likelihood statistics to identify lexical items that statistically distinguish each album from the other and from an external Pop Lyrics Reference Corpus. The findings reveal that TTPD draws heavily on grief, loss, and self-reflection, while TLAS favors celebration, performance, and social connection. Beyond its descriptive aims, this study carries direct implications for English language teaching: the identified lexical bundles and semantic patterns offer authentic, culturally engaging materials for vocabulary instruction, formulaic language awareness, and the development of reading and listening skills in EFL/ESL contexts. Findings are expected to contribute to corpus stylistics, the linguistics of popular music, and data-driven approaches to language pedagogy.
Keywords: corpus linguistics, lexical bundles, semantic fields, Taylor Swift, EFL/ESL pedagogy, popular music, data-driven learning
Biography
Hoa Tran is an English teacher and independent researcher based in Da Nang, Vietnam. He graduated from the University of Foreign Language Studies, The University of Da Nang, where he built a strong foundation in language education. Hoa currently teaches English at a private language center, and he is an independent researcher whose research interests focus on three main areas teaching methodology, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis.
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