Searching for the Right Word or Phrase that Would Put a Chill Up the Spine A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Mark E. Smith's Lyrics

In examining Mark E. Smith’s songcraft, we don’t engage in a close reading of a particular song or investigate fan reception of songs. Rather, we adopt an interdisciplinary research approach which focuses on the discourse(s) present in the lyrics of The Fall via, in the first instance, an investigation of patterns and irregularities in the linguistic characteristics of the lyrics themselves. We do this by blending macro-level, thematic analysis of the lyrics, with more micro bottom-up corpus-based analysis; the corpus-based approach to discourse analysis is elaborated in this chapter. Given Mark E. Smith’s evident love of words and of wordplay we hold that it is entirely fitting that we focus on a more systematic analysis of his lyrics.