General Conclusion & Further Paths of Research

The POS distribution for the 1950s, the 1970s, and the 2000s interests me because the distributions of the parts of speech has a lot of nouns and very few of everything else. I'm not sure why that is the case for those decades specifically. I believe a closer reading of the lyrics in those decades may prove valuable.

Characteristics that seem to stay roughly the same through the decades are the sentiments and infantilization. The phrases in the songs are usually neutral, and tend to use more positive words than negative. The common words use tend to be casual (gonna, yay) and when referring to another person, tends to favor infantilizing words (baby, girl, boy). Those words are often also considered terms of endearment (see: the entirety of Justin Beiber's "Baby"), but it's interesting to see how these terms persist over the decades over alternatives (honey, sweetheart, dear, love). Examining the relationship between terms of endearment in songs over the decades, and the public's perception of what love is may be an interesting project to take.

The common words used tend to be standard and colloqial English, and not characterisitc of any subgroups. This supports the idea that the artists try to relate to the largest group possible since this is language many would be familiar with. This may also explain the shift from the "he" or "she" to the personal yet more specific "you". For example, the song Goodnight Irene was originally a folk song sung by Huddie Ledbetter, an African-American murderer. However, it didn't become popular until The Weavers, a folk music quartet, made it more wholesome and less bleak, which made it appeal to more people (Source 1)(Source 2). The original references morphine and said that her mother said that Irene was "too young" which are more controversial topics to middle-class Americans. The Weaver's version don't mention those at all, and is just a saccharine love song.