Linguistic Personality of a Modern Rap Artist (Based on Texts of Juice WRLD, Travis Scott, 21 Savage, ASAP Rocky)

Abstract

This study examines the linguistic personality of the author of rap lyrics through the analysis of linguistic means. A linguistic personality is any native speaker of a particular language, characterized on the basis of an analysis of the texts produced by him in terms of the use in these texts of the systemic means of this language to reflect his vision of the surrounding reality and to achieve certain goals in this world, thus studying a linguistic personality allows to get the most complete picture of the subculture as part of world culture. The aim of this article is to analyse a number of rap texts in order to study a linguistic personality of a modern rap artist so the conclusion of what the corresponding linguistic world-image is like can be made. The study allowed to elicit three levels of a lingustic personality (according to Yuri Karaulov) which therefore gave us an image of the main semantic fields of the analyzed rap texts (such as crime, guns, religion etc.), as well as moral and ideological values and motives of a modern rap artist, thus defining the linguistic personality of a modern rap artist as a member of the “hip-hop” subculture discoursive space.

The author expresses gratitude to the scientific supervisor, associate professor, Candidate of Philological Sciences Leontieva Olesya Vyacheslavovna.