Per Aage Brandt and Ulf Cronquist
Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen’s song in the perspective of a semio-cognitive poetics
0.Abstract
We briefly introduce the Aarhus school cognitive-semiotic blending (conceptual integration) model, which in contrast to the Fauconnier & Turner model builds on phenomenology, and apply it to the semiotic and semantic structure of Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah, thereby showing how the singular value of the key word is built up through a process that blends erotic and religious content, and which places the music of the song in a decisive position. The musical and verbal auto-referential deixis is shown to play an important role in this process of meaning construction, typical of the way songs proceed. The analysis and its approach may thus be able to inspire research on the poetics of songs, especially in popular music, and the under-researched area of song lyrics more generally.
Keywords: Semiotic blending; Hallelujah; cognitive poetics; enunciation; song lyrics; deixis; auto-reference.
Thanks for permission Per Aage Brandt and Ulf Cronquist to publish it here :brand-cronquist(2)
