Song, meaning-making in a dialogue

Disciplinary background A. Pragmatics. Music might have preceded language as means of communication (Fitch, 2009; Brown, 2000) and its meaning therefore seems to unfold in a dialog. Just like prosody conveys speaker’s intentions (Hellbernd & Sammler, 2016), the musical accompaniment gives away author’s intentions. By decoding its relevant features (Wilson & Sperber, 2008) the perceiver interprets the intended message. Disciplinary background B. Cognitive Linguistics. Similar conceptual networks for language and music have been suggested (Schön et al., 2010), and the capacity of the latter to convey concepts has been empirically proven (Painter & Koelsch, 2011). Since the two systems perform remarkably similar interpretive feats (Patel, 2008), linguistics provides useful tools to discover the nature of musical meaning. Abstract This paper endeavours to shed light on the mechanisms underlying allocation of meaning and the exact role of the perceiver participating in the sense-making interaction which is song listening. Language and music are human universals involving perceptually discrete elements organised in hierarchically structured sequences (Jentschke et al., 2005). Given its similarity with language, in past decades music has attracted scholars from cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics (Patel, 2008; Peretz & Zatorre, 2005). These disciplines provide tools to specify the nature of meaningful mental representations and have offered evidence for overlapping brain areas for the processing of both musical and language meaning (Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2008), as well as shared conceptual networks for language and music (Schön et al., 2010). This study in cognition and perception of songs highlights the communicative nature of music (Slevc, 2012), and approaches song as a twofold dialog between the music and the lyrics, as well as between the author and the listener. The use of ecological material, such as songs, seems necessary to uncover the true nature of brain's processing of meaning in both domains (Fitch, 2015), yet only few studies have been focusing on the cognitive processes underlying sense-making of song. This paper endeavours to show that song perception is analogous