The Genres, Prosody and Pragmatics of Rap

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,1 , Bielefeld University, language: English, abstract: Preliminaries

The first song whose rhythmic style of singing predates rapping was already published in the 1920s. About 50 years later, the first historically known rap song was published.

Since then, this genre has undergone many changes and has been examined from diverse angles. Various cultural, historical and language-centered studies have been conducted on rap music. There is, however, little research particularly concerned with

the different musical categories of rap, vocal deliveries of rap and the usage and understanding of language in contexts of rap from a pragmatical point of view. To investigate some of the genres linguistic properties, the main focus of this paper will

be on the genres, prosody and pragmatics of rap music.

The paper is divided into five chapters and three major parts. After the introduction and some general thoughts about the history of rap music, the first major part deals with the generic classification of this genre in chapter three. A general overview of the

different genres of rap is given here by focusing on their musical, thematic and vocal style variations. It will be explored whether genres of rap are related to each other, overlap and whether each genre encompasses a different style of vocal delivery. All

the lyrics of the songs which will be mentioned and discussed in this thesis are available in the appendix accompanied by a CD of songs and files.

Taking into account the different vocal styles, which will be mentioned in chapter three, in chapter four, particular focus will be drawn to the prosodic variations of vocal styles, especially to stress. In this respect, an experiment has been conducted by

which prosodic differences of vocal styles will be discussed in chapter four. It is not the objective of this thesis to focus on the physical nature of musical sounds (i.e. instrumental sounds) of rap music or the musical styles of different rap genres.

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