黑人说唱乐的文体研究Stylistic Research on African American Rap Song Lyrics开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述）

languagesalways stay active because new rules of usage now and then come up with newideas and social development. rap music, showing up on grammy awards more andmore often these years, is a kind of special art performance based on plenty oflanguage expression. therefore, it is often recognized by music fields ratherthan linguistics circle. but among numerous music styles, rap music isundoubtedly the most related music form with linguistic culture concerning itsphonetics, tunes, rhythmics and stylistics, thus contains profound socialsignificance. rap music was first born in american black community who had longbeen discriminated and compressed, during which period it served as a tool toventing their frustration and was regarded as a typical non-mainstream culture.

mostsociologists, linguists and psychologists consider that rap music is, for theblack, an activity to promote personalities, to unite and to strive for justiceand dignity as well as a behavior to fight for freedom and to resist the whiteculture. in rap lyrics, african american english has its own stylistic featureson phonetics, lexics, syntax and contexts. errol, a. henderson（1996）said that analysts ofamerican life have long argued that local social life is central to normativeparticipation in the affairs of the nation. three of these areas of sociallife-religious association, family life, and local politics-are critical sitesat which americans are deemed ''good citizens'' and at which civic virtue isevidenced. there is undoubtedly a tight relation between rap lyrics and africanamerican english. wolfram, walt(2007) indicated that unchallenged assumptions,unilateral explanations, and imagined dichotomies need to be scrutinized morecritically with regard to the canon of aae description by presenting severalexamples of sociolinguistic myths, including the regional myth, the changemyth, and the social stratification myth. e.h. tyson，d. porcher(2012) pointedout that tests of factorial equivalence suggested that the factor structure ofthe rap was equivalent across racial groups. the rap is a tool with strongpsychometric properties and can be used by practitioners and researchersworking with black and white subgroups. jin yue(1991) disagreed the translationof rap into “lei pu” in chinese in the early 1990s. he preferred rap as hippies’talking style in 1960s, saying that rap music was at the beginning very rudeand full of anger and depression towards life but after yeas some rappers withprofound thoughts began to fill the lyrics with principles of life, trying toshow the positive aspects of rap music. jiang mingyuan(2014) concluded that thestylistic features of african american rap lyrics came from the longdiscrimination and oppression, which stirred up the rebellion inside the black.rap songs, especially their lyrics, serves as a reflection of the influence ofblack culture to the entire american history and society. efforts will be madeto explore the novel stylistic features of african american vernacular englishwithin the specific literary form of rap songs. language is also the carrier aswell as the media of culture, for which its essence is inevitably influenced byculture.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

Beingknown by more and more people, Rap music, together with Black English, graduallygains the popularity for its rhythmicity, conciseness, novelty andcreativeness. The thesis will focus on the analysis of stylistic features, dothe language descriptions and discuss the contextual factors of Rap Song Lyricsfrom the perspective of modern stylistics theories and the general analysismode, concluding the characters of Rap lyrics in phonetics, grammar, vocabularyand syntax level, then studies the contextual factors for which the features ofRap lyrics come into being. The thesis will apply Halliday’s Register Theory:field, mode and tenor of discourse to do the language description, which triesto make thoroughly comprehend and appreciate between language and culture. Qualitativeresearch will be used to explore Rap lyrics based on the relationship betweenlanguage and culture and from the perspective of stylistics. Analyses on some Raplyrics will help discuss the phonetics, tunes, rhythmics and stylisticsfeatures of Rap music. Widespread attention on such kind of specific literalform is expected through the research on the linguistic aspect and the culturalaspect.

3. 研究计划与安排

before 20th january: settlement of thetitle

before20th march: submission of the outline

4. 参考文献（12篇以上）

[1] chambers, tamela. theconcise guide to hip-hop music: a fresh look at the art of hip hop, from oldschool beats to freestyle rap[j]. library journal, 2015, 140: 102-102.

[2] damon sajnani. rappingin the light: american africanism and rap minstrelsy[j]. souls, 2014, 16(3-4): 303-329.

[3] errol, a. henderson.black nationalism and rap music[j]. journal of black studies, 1996, 26(3): 11-14.