Americanization in British popular music 1953-2009: A sociolinguistic approach

There has long been linguistic and sociological interest in Americanization in British popular music. Previous studies (e.g., Trudgill 1983; Cooper and Cooper 1993) have attempted to investigate how Americanization is manifested in singing as well as possible motivations to adopt American styles. However, their focus is heavily skewed towards perceptually salient phonological variables. Thus, in this thesis, I seek to examine Americanization through examining less perceptually salient variables, i.e., grammatical variables. For analysis, I first established an analytical model for the textual measurement of “Americanness.” Following exemplar theory, grammatical forms that are more frequent in American English speech than in British English speech were used as evidence of “Americanness.” Through keyword analysis, spoken variables including ain’t, multiple negation, third person don’t, and the intensifier so were chosen as research objects. The frequency of the grammatical variables in British popular music was then calculated in the variable framework. The main material was drawn from a 1,400,000 word-corpus which was specifically made for this project. The effects of musical genres, the period of the appearance on music charts (1953-2009), and the singer’s and the songwriter’s home region were also examined. The patterns were then contrasted with predictions of five possible referees, i.e., American popular music, popularity of American acts, speech of American consumers, the size of the American music market, and singability of linguistic (grammatical) items. This thesis demonstrates that, in a similar fashion to phonological and non-linguistic variation, referees of grammatical variation are most likely American popular music and popularity of American acts as well as singability of linguistic items. However, I also found that the same variation is affected by the home region of British singers and songwriters. This means that American styles co-exist with British styles in British popular music.