P
Puddle Boots
Guest
Wow! I can't believe this subforum escaped me for so long! (Also just recently discovered you can view the kanji from the lyrics pages and was quite astonished...)
So, I've been doing some quantitative YK lyric analysis, just for fun, counting the first and second person pronouns used in her songs. I mentioned this a bit in another forum, but now I'm ready to present my actual data!! As of now, I have gone through all Kalafina songs up to present, but haven't looked over any others.
As most of us are aware, first person pronouns, and to a much lesser extent second person pronouns, carry gendered implications in Japanese. (Very brief summary for those who need it: 1st person: Watashi is gender-neutral, but mostly used by women, boku is more masculine. 2nd person: anata is generic and also sometimes used to mean 'dear' as in what wives call their husbands (but not the other way around for some reason). Kimi is more informal and is used on people of equal or lower status to that of the speaker.) It is also possible to imply a pronoun that does not actually appear in the text, though this is different from a pronoun that does not appear in the text because it does not exist, which is also possible. I'm also interested in the ways in which first and second person pronouns are paired within songs, and the nuance this adds to our understanding of the lyrics.
Here are my findings. Here, "Zero" stands for an implied pronoun that does not appear in the text (there is a 1st/2nd person grammatically implied, but no pronoun physically present,) "X" stands for no pronoun (there is either no first person or no second person in the song at all, and consequently no pronoun to represent them,) and N/A stands for songs written entirely in kajiurago. By the way, in songs where a pronoun is specifically stated, but in another language, (e.g. 貴方だけが the one that I adore) the pronoun has been counted as Zero.
So we're seeing lots of I=Zero, lots of I=boku, some I=watashi, a lot of you=anata, and a whole lot of you=kimi. So, how are these paired within the actual songs? (My apologies for the sloppy formatting. I am not the best with computers...)
So here we see that Kalafina music overwhelmingly pairs boku/kimi, and frequently pairs watashi/anata, and also frequently uses both of those second person pronouns with a Zero first person pronoun. What I found interesting was the five songs pairing watashi/kimi, (ひかりふる、君が光に変えて行く、夏の朝、やさしいうた、Magia) and the one song pairing boku/anata (Symphonia), as these seem to be much less common. I have some hypotheses about the reasons behind this, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts as well.
Fun fact: the only Kalafina song that even contains a first or second pronoun other than watashi, boku, anata, or kimi, is "love come down," in which the narrator quotes other people who talk about her, and in their voice refers to herself as "omae," a rude/informal way to say "you." This is not counted in the above analysis because it comes from a third person, rather than the "I" and "you" who are the focus of the song.
So, I've been doing some quantitative YK lyric analysis, just for fun, counting the first and second person pronouns used in her songs. I mentioned this a bit in another forum, but now I'm ready to present my actual data!! As of now, I have gone through all Kalafina songs up to present, but haven't looked over any others.
As most of us are aware, first person pronouns, and to a much lesser extent second person pronouns, carry gendered implications in Japanese. (Very brief summary for those who need it: 1st person: Watashi is gender-neutral, but mostly used by women, boku is more masculine. 2nd person: anata is generic and also sometimes used to mean 'dear' as in what wives call their husbands (but not the other way around for some reason). Kimi is more informal and is used on people of equal or lower status to that of the speaker.) It is also possible to imply a pronoun that does not actually appear in the text, though this is different from a pronoun that does not appear in the text because it does not exist, which is also possible. I'm also interested in the ways in which first and second person pronouns are paired within songs, and the nuance this adds to our understanding of the lyrics.
Here are my findings. Here, "Zero" stands for an implied pronoun that does not appear in the text (there is a 1st/2nd person grammatically implied, but no pronoun physically present,) "X" stands for no pronoun (there is either no first person or no second person in the song at all, and consequently no pronoun to represent them,) and N/A stands for songs written entirely in kajiurago. By the way, in songs where a pronoun is specifically stated, but in another language, (e.g. 貴方だけが the one that I adore) the pronoun has been counted as Zero.
So we're seeing lots of I=Zero, lots of I=boku, some I=watashi, a lot of you=anata, and a whole lot of you=kimi. So, how are these paired within the actual songs? (My apologies for the sloppy formatting. I am not the best with computers...)
So here we see that Kalafina music overwhelmingly pairs boku/kimi, and frequently pairs watashi/anata, and also frequently uses both of those second person pronouns with a Zero first person pronoun. What I found interesting was the five songs pairing watashi/kimi, (ひかりふる、君が光に変えて行く、夏の朝、やさしいうた、Magia) and the one song pairing boku/anata (Symphonia), as these seem to be much less common. I have some hypotheses about the reasons behind this, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts as well.
Fun fact: the only Kalafina song that even contains a first or second pronoun other than watashi, boku, anata, or kimi, is "love come down," in which the narrator quotes other people who talk about her, and in their voice refers to herself as "omae," a rude/informal way to say "you." This is not counted in the above analysis because it comes from a third person, rather than the "I" and "you" who are the focus of the song.
