UC Berkeley

Songwriters have always taken full advantage of the ‘artistic license’ offered them by their listeners. This dissertation investigates the freedoms and limitations of artistic license by examining language in the musical environment. This dissertation uses Optimality Theory as its method of analysis together with Peircean Semiotics. The OT analysis includes examples from both English and German and investigates the musical environment on syntactic, morphological, and phonological levels. The dissertation also explores the potential impact that songs can have on spoken language by considering the differences between modifications and innovations in songwriting. Additionally, I examine the roles iconicity and arbitrariness play in art and pop culture. As evolving principles of the Sign, iconicity and arbitrariness interact with one another in an overlapping manner, thus producing new innovations in art and language. These new innovations are then conventionalized, creating a new layer upon which more innovations take place. The fractal nature of this process adds credence to the reproductive nature of Peirce’s Triad. Lastly, this dissertation applies Peirce’s Triad to the art form of sound recording to shed light on that creative process and is then applied for an analysis of dissimilar musical genres to add further explication on the differing expectations of those musical genes.