Res Humanitariae

Linguistic expressions not only give great freedom for the pleasures of the imagination and the emotions, but are also a common way for singers to express the nature of their personal life in an indirect form of communication. Melancholic and enthusiastic musical works can evoke strong emotions in listeners, and analysing their linguistic features can help us understand how they create these emotions. This research analyses numerous linguistic devices to determine how melancholy and enthusiasm are represented in vast Lana Del Rey’s discography. Thus, the purpose is to overview Lana Del Rey’s entire body of work, understand what emotions are predominant in her music, and what linguistic means of expression are used to convey them. The purpose will be achieved by completing the following tasks: to investigate the notion of linguistic expressions in language; to review Lana Del Rey’s musical works and gather all linguistic expressions in order to classify them according to the emotions that they evoke; to identify linguistic expressions of melancholy and enthusiasm that are used in Lana Del Rey’s vast discography and define their characteristics; to determine the most dominant linguistic expression of melancholy and enthusiasm specifying the dominant emotion.

The aim of this paper is, by using Computational linguistics method to analyse collocations of ethnonyms leiši and lietuvieši ‘Lithuanians’ in “Balanced Corpus of Modern Latvian” (Līdzsvarots mūsdienu latviešu valodas tekstu korpuss), compare contextual semantics of both ethnonyms. Comparing the frequency of use of the lexemes lietuvieši and leiši ‘Lithuanians’ in the modern Latvian language text corpus, the prevalence of the ethnonym lietuvieši is evident, therefore, the ethnonym leiši, regardless of its use as synonymic designation (sometimes in one and the same text), can be considered as an obsolete word. The desemantisation cases of the ethnonym leiši, detected in the corpus, show its oldness and varied functionality in Latvian language. The evidences to prove the statement of the “Modern Latvian Language Dictionary” (Mūsdienu latviešu valodas vārdnīca) that the lexeme leiši nowadays “carries slightly pejorative stylistically expressive colouring” were not found in the text corpus. In general, the image of a Lithuanian reflected in the modern Latvian language text corpus is rather positive – mostly in historical, language, culture and sports contexts, yet in the context of economics and emigration rather negative impression of Lithuanians is expressed.