Linguistics and Pop Culture

This chapter starts from the general observation that the language of pop culture (LPC) represents an understudied subject area—both in general and in linguistics as an empirical scholarly discipline. This is highly surprising given the ubiquity and high social relevance commonly assigned to pop culture. The understudied nature of LPC is shown by the facts: that pop registers scarcely feature among the text categories included in any of the general reference corpora of English; that the number of empirical studies explicitly devoted to LPC has been growing, but still is comparatively scarce; and that the linguistic perspective is at times combined with some kind of aesthetic evaluation. The majority of the arguments have been explored in detail in connection with music and lyrics. The chapter suggests that the findings listed equally apply to other types of pop culture (PC) artifacts, as they possess broader relevance.