International Journal of Language & Linguistics

A Study of Pop Songs based on the Billboard Corpus
Yasunori Nishina

Abstract
Listening to pop songs has been without any doubt enjoyed as a pastime all over the world. From the viewpoint of applied linguists, this situation automatically raises the two fundamental questions of what the linguistic features of pop songs are and how pop songs contribute to language learning and education, although they have largely been neglected as a viable source of data or a topic in these fields. For this reason, on the basis of the author's original pop song corpus, this paper investigates various features identified in the lyrics of contemporary popular songs ranked in the Billboard Hot 100 chart for a decade (2002-2011) to grasp the delineation of this genre, and provides basic data utilizable for the design of future English materials and their development in detail.

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