Anatomizing Taylor Swift’s ‘1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ Album

Abstract

This qualitative study examines the parallelism in 21 songs from Taylor Swift's '1989 (Taylor's Version)' album at the morphological-lexical and phonological levels, as well as the figurative languages used. The study has two research questions: (1) What are the occurring parallelisms in the album in terms of Morphological–Lexical level and Phonological Level? (2) What are the different types of figurative languages employed? Content analysis was used to determine morpheme, word, and phrase repetition, while Cambridge Dictionary was used to identify assonance, alliteration, and consonance repetition. Inter-coding was also used. The study is grounded in Leech and Short's Foregrounding Theory and Perrine's Figurative Language Theory. Word repetition was the most frequent, followed by morpheme repetition. The findings revealed that Taylor Swift employed parallelisms in the said album such as morpheme, word, and phrase repetition. The word repetition got the highest frequency number with two hundred fifty-one (251), followed by morpheme repetition with one hundred sixty-seven (167) frequency number. The top five most prevalent figurative languages in the songs were metaphor, hyperbole, paradox, simile, and personification. The current study is presented using a formalist perspective, the study suggests using a different lens of analysis—the functionalist approach.