The Music of Language
and the Language of Music

In the process of language development, vocabulary acquisition is the most dynamic component, as vocabulary continues to develop throughout an individual’s lifetime (Peretić et al., 2015). This process is influenced primarily by linguistic factors, but even more so by extralinguistic ones. Standardized assessments of reading literacy (PISA, 2018; PIRLS, 2021) indicate that students experience difficulties in reading comprehension largely due to increasingly limited vocabularies. In traditional language teaching, vocabulary is not taught directly in the same way as grammar or spelling. Instead, it is usually taught indirectly, with unfamiliar words in texts being explained through other words that may also be unfamiliar to students. For a primary school child to fully understand a text, they must know between 90%–95% of the words it contains. Furthermore, vocabulary breadth is directly associated with overall educational achievement and later academic success. All of the above highlights the need for changes in the teaching of the mother tongue.

Research by Pažur and Aladrović Slovaček (2025) demonstrated that the use of aesthetic and embodied methods has a positive effect on the acquisition of new and unfamiliar words, as well as on learning new meanings of already known words. For this reason, the project Vocabulary Development in Early Primary School Children through Aesthetic and Embodied Methods—RjeŠko (Croatian Science Foundation, HRZZ–2024–05–8305) aims to investigate how musical activities, including singing games, counting-out rhymes, music listening, experimental exploration of musical instruments and children’s songs, affect the acquisition of new target vocabulary at both receptive and productive levels.

It is expected that pupils will enjoy the use of musical activities in Croatian language instruction and that these activities will positively influence their attitudes and motivation toward school and learning Croatian as their mother tongue.

The influence of English as a global language (Crystal, 2003) across different layers of society has not bypassed the realm of entertainment (Zhu in Sigismondi, 2020), as the global availability of content has broadened opportunities to exercise soft power at new levels.

Using the tools of text analysis and contrastive linguistics, this study investigates the embedding of English lyrics in original soundtracks (OSTs) of contemporary Chinese TV series, i.e., their syntactic and semantic dimensions, as previous research strongly argues that this constitutes a prominent linguistic and cultural phenomenon.

Syntactically, the research focuses on structural adaptations that accommodate the text within sentences governed by Chinese syntactic rules. The preliminary findings point to the use of fragmented clauses, parallelisms, and non-standard clausal and sentence patterns, in which grammatical correctness gives way to rhythm and singability. The main focus will be on adapting English pseudo-canonical word order to accommodate the melodic contours of the OSTs under study.

Semantically, the research focuses on the use of linguistic tools to express culturally nuanced Chinese issues through a blend of intertwined bilingual expressions. The analysis examines both the surface and deeper levels of connotation evoked within the narrative scope of the corpus under study.

The main aim of the study is to uncover the linguistic strategy underpinning this particular bridging of Eastern and Western linguistic structures, thereby revealing the traits of interlingual creativity and the cross-cultural dynamics of this emerging trend in globalised music and media environments.

This paper endeavours to probe the intersections between Early Modern music in contemporary literature and Early Modern literature in contemporary music, looking at Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a fruitful source for remediation (a term coined by Bolter and Grusin) and transmediation (a term coined by Charles Suhor). The play is weighed against two musical works it has inspired: Thomas Adès’ opera The Tempest (2004) and Jeremy Sams’ pastiche The Enchanted Island (2011). In the former, the Australian writer Meredith Oaks adapts Shakespeare’s text to the traditional requirements of an opera libretto, adding rhyme to make it more singable. In the latter, the versatile British author Jeremy Sams creates a sparkling mash-up between The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and borrows Dryden’s 1667 subtitle to establish a parallel with the Manhattan island of the Metropolitan Opera, which commissioned this occasional revival of the Baroque spectacular.

Both interdisciplinary exchanges illustrate the shift of mentality across four hundred years. Adès’ transmedial metamorphosis accounts for the social and philosophical transformations, illustrating the first shy attempts at women’s emancipation and emphasising postmodernist and postcolonial features (a positive revaluation of Caliban and a rebellious Ariel). In Sams’ pastiche, postmodernism, postcolonialism and feminism are present in comic and parodic mode, with a disenchanted Neptune that shows the crisis of culture, religion and authority, with an emasculated Prospero, an incompetent Ariel, but a rejuvenated, triumphant and empowered Sycorax.

In an eclectic approach blending hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, this paper strives to analyse how Elizabethan theatre finds new valences in contemporary culture.

From its origins in ritual and performance, theatre has maintained an enduring relationship with music, which has long served as a vital dramaturgical and expressive element. Choral odes, minstrelsy, operatic drama, musical theatre and, more recently, experimental forms of modern and contemporary theatre have consistently utilised music and song to construct meaning, intensify pathos, and negotiate cultural and political identities. This enduring relationship between theatre and music acquires particular significance in feminist drama, where women playwrights have persistently experimented with dramatic form in their efforts to challenge and subvert patriarchal hegemony. Within this ongoing experimentation, music and song emerge as powerful means through which feminist dramatists resist gender essentialism and expose gender as a socially and culturally constructed performance.

Informed by postmodernist theories of intermediality, fragmentation and irony, alongside Brechtian notions of gestus and Butler’s theory of gender performativity, this paper examines Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro (1986) and Christina Reid’s The Belle of the Belfast City (1989) to explore how music and song, as performative practices, function as disruptive strategies that challenge gender essentialism and destabilise fixed notions of identity.

Ever since the dawn of time, there have been attempts at normative establishment of art in all its aspects, with literature and music being no strangers to these efforts. Yet, authors of these forms have proven rather elusive in this respect, thus contributing to the widespread belief that art is the pinnacle of human creativity. But, this creativity often comes at a high price, in both artistic and personal terms.

Canonical literary works as we know them today are not mere general blueprints made true; they are an intricate mixture of trade rules and techniques, embellished with a touch of pure genius that defies all trends. With regard to that, the subsequent translation of such pieces must follow the same route, and this is becoming increasingly challenging in an era promoting instant solutions that seemingly make the human author redundant.

In this sense, the paper tackles issues such as originality, intelligibility and finality of both the genuine piece and its transposition into another language and culture, with a view to discussing the imminent use of AI tools that raise numerous ethical questions as regards the quality of work performed and the authorship, with reference to two antipodes from the world of music.

The relationship between language and music has traditionally been explored through phonological and prosodic features, whereas the contribution of syntactic organization to textual musicality has received considerably less scholarly attention. This paper addresses that gap by examining syntax as a fundamental stylistic mechanism through which rhythm, repetition and musical structuring are generated and transferred in literary discourse. The analysis is based on Elfriede Jelinek’s Winterreise and its Serbian translation, a text whose aesthetic conception is deeply intertwined with the intertextual dialogue with Franz Schubert’s song cycle of the same title. Adopting a contrastive linguistic and stylistic perspective, the study investigates the translation of syntactic repetition, parallelism, sentence fragmentation, rhythmic sequencing and recursive syntactic patterns that shape the musical architecture of the narrative. Particular emphasis is placed on the extent to which these structures preserve their rhythmic and interpretative functions in the target text, as well as on the translator’s role in negotiating the tension between formal equivalence and stylistic effect. The paper argues that syntax should be understood not merely as a grammatical framework but as an autonomous aesthetic resource capable of producing musicality and organizing textual meaning. In this context, syntactic shifts in translation are interpreted as transformations of rhythmic and semantic structures rather than solely as linguistic adaptations. By integrating insights from contrastive syntax, stylistics, translation studies and intermediality research, the study proposes a model for analysing textual musicality beyond the phonetic level and demonstrates the importance of syntactic organization in preserving the artistic identity of literary texts across languages.

Auditory processing disorder (APD) refers to difficulties in how the brain interprets sounds, despite typically normal hearing acuity. For neurodivergent learners such difficulties may co-occur with, or be embedded within, their broader profile, affecting how spoken language, background noise and musical input are processed. These difficulties are not uniform: they may present as trouble distinguishing similar sounds, following speech in noise, or processing rapid or overlapping input, and may fluctuate with context, fatigue or emotional state.

Music perception presents a paradox. Some neurodivergent learners show heightened sensitivity to pitch, timbre or rhythm, which may be a source of enjoyment, strong musical memory and pattern-based learning relevant to language acquisition, or, depending on context, of sensory overload. Others struggle to extract linguistic information, such as song lyrics, from a musical backdrop, or to filter out background music, so that sound increases cognitive load rather than producing its intended calming effect.

This talk considers how an understanding of auditory processing differences cautions against the uncritical use of music in language teaching. Despite its popularity, music may pose real challenges: background tracks can compete with instruction, song-based tasks can raise rather than reduce cognitive load, and auditory sensitivity can render certain sounds distressing rather than motivating. For learners with APD, the layering of melody, rhythm and lyrics may make it especially hard to isolate the linguistic content teachers intend to foreground. Such difficulties are compounded when they are not visible or easily voiced, so an activity may appear to run smoothly while some learners struggle to access it. Teachers are therefore encouraged to treat music not as a default engagement strategy but as one option among many—introduced with care, offered flexibly and reviewed against individual responses.

This study explores the intersection between the formal structures of music, spoken language and classical rhetoric, drawing on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory in The Critique of the Power of Judgment. In that work, Kant defines music as a language of affects that operates through a purely formal organization, free from determinate conceptual content. From this characterization arises the central problem of the present study: to what extent can the expressive and temporal mechanisms of pure music be distinguished from the strategies for influencing the mind examined by the rhetorical tradition, and what ethical implications arise from this affinity?

Methodologically, the study combines a conceptual reconstruction of Kantian philosophy with a comparative analysis of the classical doctrine of ethos and the tradition of musica poetica. It argues that Kant draws upon a dual foundation to account for the impact of musical compositions: a synchronic mathematical-Pythagorean paradigm, in which intervallic proportions act directly upon sensibility, and a diachronic rhetorical-discursive paradigm, which conceives of composition as a temporal discourse endowed with internal coherence. Considered together, these paradigms illuminate the relation between music, language and persuasion within Kant’s aesthetics.

The central contribution of this study is to show that, although music and rhetoric share non-conceptual structures that reveal the subject’s affective vulnerability, Kant introduces a decisive ethical safeguard. Whereas the ars oratoria risks becoming an instrument of manipulation when subordinated to hidden ends, music as a fine art remains protected by the figure of genius and by the principle of purposiveness without purpose. The study thus proposes an original interpretive framework for understanding how aesthetic reception mediates between affective experience, the feeling of health and practical reason.

This paper explores the relationship between text and music through selected examples from the Western musical tradition, ranging from medieval organum and bilingual motets to contemporary vocal and multilingual compositions. Rather than following a linear historical overview, the focus is placed on the analysis of key parameters that shape the interaction between text and music: prosody, the relationship between verbal and musical form, text intelligibility, word painting, multilingualism, and the hierarchy between linguistic and musical expression. Through examples from the works of G. de Machaut, G. da Palestrina, A. Schoenberg, V. Milošević and other composers, it is demonstrated that the relationship between text and music cannot be described as a simple development from the dominance of words to musical autonomy or vice versa, as the boundaries between speech, singing, and musical sound are continuously redefined. The analysis shows that the relationship between text and music does not develop linearly through history, but rather through different models of their interaction, in which the roles of language and musical expression are constantly reconsidered and redefined.

The Goriška region, situated in Western Slovenia, has often been a theatre of nationalistic and irredentist fervour. The region was occupied by the Italian army after World War I and remained under the rule of the Savoy crown until Italy’s withdrawal from World War II in 1943. During this period, the Slovene language faced systematic oppression and even forced extinction; still, it became the most common form of resistance. Writing, be it journalistic, artistic or personal, was at that time arguably the most widespread mode of expression. After World War II, music began to dominate the cultural sphere of the region, with local musical acts taking up the motif of resistance after their pen-and-paper precursors. This study thus aims to answer the question, ‘How (if at all) did the notion of national self-preservation, expressed through popular pieces of writing (both musical and not), differ when comparing the period of Italian occupation (1918–1943) with that of socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991)?’ The paper will refer mainly to 1) original pieces of writing kept in the Regional Archive of Nova Gorica and 2) song lyrics written and performed by local acts. Ultimately, it seeks to contribute to the research of national resistance on the basis of language in a presently scarcely explored combination of historical context (Goriška region, fascism, socialism) and field (music, writing).

This paper explores the socio-cultural and political role of blues culture in the processes of identity and economic emancipation of Black women in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple (1982). Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of cultural materialism and Black feminist criticism, the study analyzes the blues not merely as an aesthetic or formal phenomenon, but as a historically conditioned space of resistance against racial oppression and intraracial patriarchy (Collins, 1990). Through the analysis of the submissive Celie and the emancipated blues singer Shug Avery, this work examines how blues culture functions as an alternative social space that offers bodily awareness, sexual autonomy and economic independence outside the control of male figures (Davis, 1998). By examining spaces such as juke joints and the context of the Great Migration, the research demonstrates that the introduction of the blues subculture into the narrative serves as a catalyst for breaking the imposed domestic silence and transforming private trauma into a collective voice of resistance (hooks, 1989). Ultimately, the paper concludes that Alice Walker deploys the historical legacy of early-twentieth-century women’s blues as an ideological and political tool to redefine the social status of Black women in American society.

In late nineteenth-century American society, musical education for women was largely shaped by expectations of domestic femininity―a polite ‘parlor language’ meant to signal upper-class refinement and help attract a suitable husband. In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), however, music moves beyond this restrictive cultural role, becoming a non-verbal means of expressing female interiority and self-ownership.

This paper explores how Chopin uses musical performance to move beyond the patriarchal linguistic structures that deny Edna Pontellier the vocabulary to express her awakening desires. By contrasting the shallow, performative parlor music of the Farival twins with the instinctive and transcendent piano playing of Mademoiselle Reisz, Chopin presents the arts as a meaningful alternative system of expression. While spoken language reinforces Creole social conventions and domestic expectations, music offers Edna a way to access and articulate aspects of her inner life that remain difficult to put into words. Edna does not merely listen to music; she ‘reads’ it as a text that reflects and validates her emotional and sexual awakening.

Ultimately, this paper argues that Chopin subverts the figure of the domestic female performer by transforming music from a social commodity into a language of the untamed self. In The Awakening, music thus becomes a means of challenging patriarchal narratives, providing a voice for the otherwise unspeakable depths of female consciousness.

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how contemporary poetry by Penda can be viewed as harking back to certain poetic features of the lyrical poetry of English Renaissance. What will be especially taken into account is the way selected poets build their poetic images through a set of clearly defined metaphors, motifs, metonymies and descriptions that are a permanent feature throughout their poetry. Well-known names such as John Donne, Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare and their poems will be put side by side with a selected group of poems by our contemporary poet, Petar Penda. The aim is not to demonstrate any possible formal feature for which we can claim that Penda consciously transferred onto his own poetic work. The aim is to show that some contemporary poets can be shown to operate in the same way Renaissance English poets operated when they created their poems. In this pioneer attempt, we will––hopefully successfully––demonstrate how certain common features in the operation of creating a lyrical poem can be seen as being very similar in these two cases, despite the huge time distance between Renaissance period and our contemporaneity. In other words, our claim would be that the spirit of English Renaissance lyrical mastery––its precision, self-limitation, concentration of poetic images and descriptions––is precisely what distinguishes Penda’s poetic opus. Poems by Penda that will be taken into consideration, among others, are ‘The Sea’, ‘The Seashell’, ‘Sinking’, ‘Oneness’ and ‘Words’.

This paper explores the translation of English-language song lyrics into Bosnian/ Croatian/Serbian (B/C/S), focusing on the interaction of prosodic, semantic and pragmatic features. The title alludes to ‘Neka ljubi se istok i zapad’ by the Bosnian band Plavi Orkestar, itself a cover of ‘California Dreamin’, offering a starting point for examining how songs, meanings and cultural references travel between English and B/C/S.

The analysis is based on a corpus of ten English-language songs performed by artists from Bosnia and Herzegovina, covering the period from the 1980s to the present. It examines how translation strategies negotiate the relationship between linguistic meaning and the formal and musical constraints of song lyrics. Particular attention is given to prosody (rhythm, rhyme, stress and syllable structure), semantics (lexical choices, imagery, metaphor and cultural references) and pragmatics.

The paper argues that song translation involves more than the transfer of verbal meaning: it requires a complex negotiation between language, music, performance and cultural context. The analysis therefore highlights the ways in which translated lyrics may preserve, reshape or create new meanings for B/C/S-speaking audiences.

Artificial intelligence presents one of the most significant challenges facing educators today. Scholarly journals, news media, social media and academic discussions increasingly focus on the problems posed by programs such as ChatGPT in educational settings. Teachers and professors report that students use AI to generate essays and complete assignments, while editors and organizations such as Retraction Watch highlight the growing use of AI-generated academic writing in research publications. In response, some educators advocate oral examinations or supervised in-class writing in an attempt to prevent AI misuse. Such approaches, however, risk undermining a central goal of education: fostering independent thought and research skills. Rather than treating AI solely as a threat, educators should help students learn to use it critically and creatively as a tool for learning. This presentation demonstrates how AI music and video generation programs were used to motivate students to engage with Old English language study and the reading of Beowulf.

In the last few decades, South Korea has been producing a great amount of popular things such as movies, TV series and, of course, a very specific genre of music—K-pop. In order to reach more international audience, artists have been incorporating English in their songwriting process. Another reason for doing so is to make the lyrics sound more catchy but also to integrate a certain meaning that could only be done with English words, phrases or even just inserts. One of the most popular K-pop groups—BTS, known for their skills in songwriting, use code-switching between their mother tongue (Korean) and English in their song lyrics. This paper deals with a grammatical analysis of code-switching in several BTS songs, mostly from Map of the Soul: 7 and Arirang albums while adopting the Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame Model. This model approaches code-switching from a perspective of a dominant (matrix) and an embedded language. The language that provides a grammatical frame in which inserts from another language are added is a matrix language. The analysis will be done on intrasentential, intersentential, word and morpheme levels. Code-switching has always been more than just inserting a few words from another language. Therefore, one objective of this paper is to explain why and most importantly how these shifts from one language to another occur from a grammatical perspective.

The Brazilian semiotician Luiz Tatit has developed one of the most systematic frameworks for analysing the relationship between language and music: the semiotics of song (semiótica da canção), grounded in the Greimassian and tensive framework. Building on Greimas’s generative theory of meaning and on Zilberberg’s tensive semiotics, Tatit conceives of song as a signifying process governed by gradations of intensity and extent. Elaborated from the 1980s onwards through the analysis of Brazilian popular song, this body of research remains largely unknown outside the Portuguese-speaking world. This paper offers a critical presentation of Tatit’s semiotics, arguing that prosody constitutes its theoretical cornerstone. For Tatit, song is not the mere juxtaposition of a text and a melody. It originates in the intonational gestures of everyday speech, which the songwriter stabilises, stylises and expands into melodic form. Prosodic phenomena such as intonation contours, accentuation, duration and tempo thus function as the mediating layer through which linguistic and musical meaning are produced together.

The guiding question is the following: how does prosody operate, in Tatit’s work, as the generative link between verbal enunciation and melodic composition? Methodologically, the paper reconstructs his key categories, namely figurativisation, thematisation and passionalisation, and revisits some of his analyses of Brazilian songs, showing how each regime of compatibility between lyrics and melody corresponds to a specific treatment of intonation derived from speech.

The expected contribution is twofold: to make this model available to an international audience, in dialogue with other approaches to musical meaning, and to suggest its applicability beyond Portuguese, since prosodic patterns explain both the cultural distinctiveness of songs and the conditions under which they may cross linguistic borders.

This paper examines a selection of folk proverbs and sayings related to music in order to identify the main fields of life associated with it. As short forms of a people’s narrative production, proverbs can be described as condensed versions of folk stories which portray a widespread human trait or a typical form of behaviour, reflecting a society’s collective wisdom and values, i.e. formulated general truths. They are often a result of knowledge processed over a long time, which led our ancestors to draw conclusions about various natural and social regularities they repeatedly observed. This analysis looks at the proverbs and sayings collected in Srpske narodne poslovice by Vuk Karadžić, the most famous Serbian philologist and reformer of the Serbian language, focusing on those related to songs, singing, dancing and playing an instrument. This brief semantic analysis examines the interaction between literal and figurative meanings in the selected proverbs and the ways that these expressions reflect the societal worldview. The aim of the paper is to establish which social areas the proverbs are normally connected with, what the nature of that connection is, and what might be concluded about the relevance of music in our society.

The growing internationalization of the music profession has increased the importance of English as a tool for communication, professional development and career advancement. The paper aims to investigate the English language needs of undergraduate music students and explore their perceptions of the role of English in their future professional lives. Drawing on the framework of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), the research examines students’ current language abilities, anticipated future language use, perceived challenges and learning priorities. Data will be collected through a questionnaire consisting of Likert-scale items and open-ended questions administered to undergraduate music students at the tertiary level. The study focuses on the professional contexts in which students expect to use English, including participation in international masterclasses, communication with musicians and audiences, access to professional literature, mobility programs, social media promotion, and career opportunities in the country and abroad. Furthermore, it explores which language skills students consider most important and identifies the gaps between their current proficiency and future professional requirements. The findings are expected to contribute to a better understanding of music students’ English as a foreign language needs and provide practical implications for the design of ESP courses tailored to future musicians. By aligning language instruction with the realities of contemporary musical careers, the research seeks to support students in developing the communicative competences necessary for successful participation in the global (music) community.

According to Steve Larson’s theory of musical forces, embodied experiences of physical force shape the ways in which listeners conceptualise musical motion, expectation and meaning. In this paper, I will revisit the theory of musical forces through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory, with specific attention to the relationship between metaphorical musical forces and the measurable physical forces from which they are derived. Larson’s theory, itself inspired by Rudolf Arnheim’s visual forces, describes musical motion in terms of metaphorical gravity, magnetism and inertia. Although these forces are presented as conceptual metaphors rather than literal physical phenomena, aspects of their operation appear strikingly close to the behaviour of actual physical forces. Musical magnetism, for example, appears to intensify as a pitch approaches its goal—similar to an object coming closer to a magnet—while repelled tendencies may redirect musical motion away from expected resolutions, like inverted magnets. Likewise, musical gravity functions as an ever-present force that establishes varying levels of tonal stability and instability.

Drawing on the conceptual metaphor framework of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, I will investigate how physical force domains function as source domains for the understanding of musical motion and expectation. I will further explore whether certain aspects of Larson’s musical forces may be extended or clarified through closer engagement with principles from physical science. The paper will ask how far the operational characteristics of field forces can productively illuminate the metaphorical structures through which musical meaning is conceptualised, without reducing musical experience to scientific measurement.

Achieving communicative proficiency in an L2―the ability to use primarily oral language spontaneously and appropriately to context—is difficult for most learners, notably those in formal instructional settings, even when immersed in target language environments. Reported obstacles may range from intentional and unintentional silencing of learner spontaneity to L2 anxiety. Since interaction is inherently a collaborative effort, participants must negotiate reciprocity, though they commonly differ in how they do so.

Research increasingly points to the benefits of theatrical improvisation techniques for language production in the L2 classroom. Improv’s established use in L1 oral communication pedagogy offers a starting point for considering what techniques might transfer and what additional demands non-native speech places on this transfer, when applied to the L2 context. Separately, work on musical ability and bilingualism/multilingualism has explored parallels in the activation of cognitive and linguistic inhibition mechanisms relevant to speech production processes.

This paper asks whether the psychological benefits reported for improv and the cognitive benefits reported for music training might be mutually reinforcing when the two are combined in the language classroom. Taking L2 speech volume as an early, observable proxy for progress toward greater L2 verbal spontaneity and sophistication, this paper explores the possibility of coupling improvisation with music to support L2 (EFL) speaking output. It offers illustrative examples of improv exercises with and without musical accompaniment, and considers the conditions under which music might plausibly ease rather than add to the demands of the improv task for learners.

This paper examines the transformation of the tortoise shell into the lyre in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes as a process through which material form, sound and meaning become inseparable. It asks how transforming a bodily form into a musical instrument changes not only the object but also what it can mediate between nature and culture, body and art, and one subject and another.

The paper’s central question is how the hymn represents material transformation as mediation, and how the emergence of the lyre reshapes Hermes’ identity and his relationship with Apollo. Initially, the tortoise shell functions as a protective bodily enclosure. Through Hermes’ intervention, it is detached from its biological context and reconfigured as the resonating body of the lyre. A protective covering becomes a resonating surface; a bodily enclosure becomes a medium of sound; and an apparently insignificant natural form becomes an instrument capable of enabling new social and cultural relations.

Methodologically, the paper combines close reading with a material and media-theoretical approach. Rather than treating the shell merely as the material precursor of the instrument, it interprets Hermes’ act as one of recognition, reframing and actualisation: he identifies a potential that becomes culturally meaningful through transformation. The making of the lyre therefore transforms not only the object but also the maker, contributing to Hermes’ emergence as an inventor, mediator and cultural intermediary.

The paper concludes with a comparative reading of Jackie Kay’s ‘Shell’, in which the shell likewise exceeds its function as bodily covering and becomes a medium through which an alternative sense of self can emerge. Reading the two texts together, the paper argues that transformation changes not only what a form is, but what it can mediate—between matter and sound, language and music, nature and culture, and individual identity and social relation.

‘Bella Ciao’ is a popular anti-fascist and anti-oppression song that is hypothesized to have been originally sung by seasonal workers of paddy fields of rice in Italy from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. There is no firm evidence of relevance of this song among the partisan brigades in Italy during the Second World War, nor of the existence of the ‘partisan version’ prior to the first publication of the text as sung today in 1953. The text itself has undergone major changes, whereas the melody has remained intact.

This paper aims to analyze ‘Bella Ciao’ from the perspective of multimodal critical discourse studies, which claim that different modes or semiotic resources, such as language, images, music, gesture and so on, contribute to socially constructed and ideology-loaded meaning. Bearing in mind that ‘Bella Ciao’ has undergone the process of recontextualization, through which new meanings have been produced, using close MCDS recontextualization analysis, we endeavour to answer the following research question: has the potential ideology-loaded meaning of anti-oppression related to ‘Bella Ciao’ changed through the process of recontextualization, and if it has, what is the newly acquired meaning of the song? In order to answer this question, we will analyze the song in its original context of paddy fields in Italy, via the post-war context of a partisan song, to the popular culture context of the Spanish TV show Money Heist, and finally to the contemporary hybrid context of politics and pop music, i.e. performance of Dubioza Kolektiv in the Council of Europe at the World Forum for Democracy in 2021.

Many are the lines from The Merchant of Venice that keep being quoted more than 400 years after they came into being, both in and outrageously out of context. As with most of what Shakespeare left us in and between the lines he wrote, the mindboggling pluri-dimensionality of this play is a thickly layered onion that takes profound reflection to peel. It also contains some intriguing takes on music which on the surface—and on the surface only—may seem very romantic and corresponding fully to how most people perceive music. However, nothing is as it seems, and a more careful reading reveals the importance of not only what is being said, but also who is saying it.

There are a few important instances in the play in which music is not merely a side dish but a means of characterisation. The people pronouncing the related words are Shylock, Portia and Lorenzo, and in their respective scenes, we can discern quite different approaches to music, from the heavenly sublime to power, manipulation, othering and perceived extra-musical existence. Masterfully written, The Merchant of Venice is filled with question marks over things and views that are taken for granted and pushes us to see uncomfortable truths that outgrow the historical period in which they were first uttered, maintaining their relevance to this day.

H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Nyarlathotep’ (1920), composed reportedly from a dream and barely a thousand words long, is best understood not as a short story but as a prose poem, a text in which rhythm, cadence and sound patterning perform the work conventionally assigned to plot. This paper offers a stylistic and prosodic reading of the text, tracing its movement from the measured, periodic sentences of the opening to the breathless paratactic accumulation of the famous closing passage, in which long chains of coordinated clauses, stripped of syntactic subordination, produce the effect of chant or liturgy. The analysis argues that the text enacts cosmic dissolution at the level of grammar and cadence: as the narrator’s world disintegrates, so does the hierarchical architecture of his sentences, leaving only rhythm. The form, in short, is the meaning.

The paper then situates this incantatory technique within the wider role of music in the Cthulhu mythos, where ultimate reality is figured not as silence, nor as harmony, but as bad music: the ‘muffled, maddening’ drums and ‘monotonous’ flutes that surround Azathoth at the centre of chaos. Lovecraft thus retains the ancient Pythagorean and Boethian intuition that the cosmos is musical while inverting its content, replacing the music of the spheres with cosmic noise. A comparative glance at ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ (1921), Lovecraft’s most explicit treatment of music as both barrier and portal, completes a two-panel structure mirroring the conference theme: the music of Lovecraft’s language, and the language of Lovecraft’s music.

The theoretical framework of this paper is based on defining the concept of word painting as an element of the language of music, the ways in which it is utilized and the possibilities of its recognition within a musical example. The concept is further examined across historical musical periods—from antiquity and the Middle Ages to the modern era—using specific examples from musical literature. The aim of this paper is to present word painting as a musical-compositional technique through examples of songs intended for early childhood and preschool education. From this, the research questions of the paper emerge: examining the manner, context and extent to which this technique is used. The methodology of the paper encompasses the identification of this technique within a repository of children’s songs, as well as a classification of these songs according to selected characteristics (children’s age, key and extra-musical content). Through the analysis of selected songs from practice, the paper seeks to determine whether word painting facilitates the understanding of text and music, based on the principle by which this element of the language of music vividly connects the melody and rhythm of a particular song with its extra-musical content. Since this area is closely related to a child’s natural expression, this technique can be integrated into kindergarten activities alongside singing, combining it with movement, dramatization, listening to and recognizing sound ‘images’, playing percussion instruments, and the visual artistic expression of musical experiences. Therefore, the paper provides examples of musical activities that include elements of word painting as one of the musical components contributing to the holistic development of the child.

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have transformed natural language into a direct interface for music creation. Rather than functioning solely as descriptive instructions, prompts increasingly operate as compositional devices capable of shaping musical structure, texture, rhythm and expressive qualities. This paper asks: to what extent can prompts be understood as a new form of musical notation or score, and how does their linguistic structure influence the resulting musical output?

The study adopts a research-creation methodology combining theoretical reflection with experimental practice. A corpus of prompts will be systematically modified through controlled linguistic variations—including lexical choice, syntax, semantic specificity, metaphorical language and rhythmic organisation—while preserving the same musical intention. These prompts will be tested using current text-to-music generative models, allowing qualitative comparison of the resulting outputs in terms of timbre, form, expressivity, coherence and stylistic consistency.

Rather than evaluating the technical performance of AI models, the paper investigates the relationship between language and musical creation. It argues that part of the compositional process is shifting from traditional musical notation towards linguistic formulation, positioning prompts as hybrid artefacts that belong simultaneously to writing, musical thinking and computational interaction.

The paper contributes a conceptual framework for understanding prompts as a contemporary form of score that mediates between language and music. More broadly, it contributes to current debates on creativity, authorship and human– AI collaboration by proposing prompt writing as an emerging compositional practice in which linguistic choices directly shape musical generation.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Pastoral, occupies a significant place in the development of this genre in many ways, both in the present and future times. The five movements with titles, programmatic elements, references to folklore and the composer’s stance that the work is ‘more an expression of feelings than painting’ make the symphony interesting for analysis and research into how it can be perceived. Considering the fact that the process of perceiving a musical work represents a synthesis of the sensory experience of sound elements and visual associations, the aim of the paper is to examine whether future teachers, students of the Faculty of Education, can perceive expressive means of music (performing ensemble–instruments, melody, tempo, dynamics) and certain ‘images’ in the listened excerpts of the Symphony. The respondents were tasked with answering what they hear and ‘see’ in the listened excerpts and explaining which expressive means of music contributed to such a perception of the listened excerpt. The last task of the research concerned students’ opinions on the possibilities of applying listened excerpts in primary school music education. The results show that students were generally successful in perceiving the music they listened to and creative in their responses related to the possibilities of applying the listened music in primary school.

Digital games construct societies through distinctive linguistic styles. Thus, linguistic variation is often used to distinguish between social groups and identities. Through differences in vocabulary, speech style and phrasing, characters become associated with particular factions even when they communicate in the same language. In the online game Warframe, each faction is associated with distinct aesthetic and musical styles. This study examines whether linguistic variation among the three major factions, Orokin, Grineer and Corpus, helps create a distinct identity as well.

For each faction, a separate corpus was compiled, consisting of available sources from character dialogue, quest transcripts and selected song lyrics associated with each faction. AntConc, a corpus-analysis software, is used for frequency analysis, keyword extraction, collocation analysis and concordance searches in order to investigate lexical and structural patterns that distinguish factional speech styles.

Prominent features like pronoun usage, specialised lexis and sentence complexity are used as baseline for the contrastive analysis of the following three research questions: (1) How do factions differ in their use of first- and second-person pronouns? (2) Do factions differ with regards to which linguistic expressions characterise them? and (3) Do factions differ in syntactic complexity? The linguistic profiles of different factions are expected to exhibit systematic differences, with Orokin discourse showing greater lexical and syntactic complexity, Grineer discourse employing shorter and less complex utterances, and Corpus discourse characterised by commercial vocabulary. The analysis aims to identify how distinct linguistic styles contribute to the conceptualisation of faction identity.

This paper provides an analysis of Alice Munro’s short story collection Too Much Happiness from the point of view of style. The focal element of the writing style is Alice Munro’s frequent usage of typically one-word, verbless sentences at the end of paragraphs. This paper will show how this stylistic technique enhances Alice Munro’s literary world creation, how it creates suspense and provides emotional effect on the readership, and, most importantly, how it plays along with Alice Munro’s literary technique of creating pen-photographs. Finally, the paper will provide a possible classification of the repetitive grammatical and thematic patterns in such short and truncated sentences.

In the expansive and continuously evolving field of translation studies, literary translation involves more than simply transferring words and phrases between languages; it plays a vital role in connecting diverse cultural and literary contexts. Literary translation has unique characteristics and challenges, a distinction recognized by scholars such as Holmes (1970) and Bassnett (1980), who identified it as a separate subfield within translation studies. In recent years, there has been significant attention directed towards understanding the role and status of literary translation as an open and dynamic system, highlighting its substantial influence on national literature, as noted by critics like Baker (2000), Boase-Beier (2014) and Hermans (2014). Thus, literary translation should be viewed in the context of a nation’s literature and culture, which our study aims to explore in terms of its integration and influence. To facilitate this analysis, we will employ Polysystem Theory, drawing on the foundational contributions of Even-Zohar (1979, 1990) and Lambert (1995), along with contemporary reinterpretations of the theory as articulated by Codde (2003) and Rosa (2022). Our study will examine the impact of the polysystem on national literature by analyzing the (re)translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories into Romanian. This includes a focus on Poe’s key Romanian translations, notable translators and his overall impact on Romanian literature, illustrating his transition from the margins to becoming a canonical figure. We will emphasize the translator’s role in shaping Poe’s image for the Romanian audience, using paratextual evidence to highlight their influence on the text. Overall, these findings will suggest that Poe’s translated works reveal the importance of literary translation within the Romanian polysystem and underscore the critical role of translators in constructing an author’s image in a foreign linguistic and cultural context.

Traditional, print-centric approaches to children’s poetry often reduce young learners to passive consumers. Grounded in John Dewey’s progressive educational philosophy, this paper explores how multimodal literacy pedagogy and experiential learning can reshape creative writing into an active instance of ‘learning by doing’. By integrating generative AI as a collaborative assistant, the writing process is transformed, allowing learners to turn original verse into digital soundscapes. This study offers a literature review and conceptual analysis, illustrated by a practitioner’s scholarly self-reflection. It investigates how a multimodal approach enhances student motivation and language acquisition while offering a new framework for critical self-assessment.

The paper addresses two central research questions: 1. How can the integration of interactive generative AI tools transform a learner’s relationship with poetry from passive consumption to an active, experiential learning process? 2. In what ways does utilizing digital platforms to turn written verse into digital sounds provide a mechanism for student self-reflection, allowing learners to critically evaluate, edit and improve their creative writing? Drawing on a brief case study of the author’s own transition from written poem to composed song, this paper advocates for a shift toward multimodal pedagogy, demonstrating how bridging text and audio creates an engaging framework for language learning. Instead of alienating creators, generative AI platforms offer an interactive toolkit to construct, revise and transform original work. By translating verse into melody, learners sharpen their structural and rhythmic awareness, lower self-expression anxiety through a supportive proxy performer and view writing as an interactive experiment. Ultimately, this allows writers to step back as critics of their own work, transforming the exercise into a powerful, purposeful form of experiential learning.

This paper investigates the impact of background instrumental music on the writing of tourism destination descriptions by students of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The aim of the study was to examine whether music during writing influences the use of evaluative, experiential and sensory language in students’ written texts. The analysis was conducted on a small qualitative corpus of student assignments produced under two conditions: with music and without music. The study examined evaluative vocabulary, experiential descriptions, the use of conventional tourism discourse patterns, as well as students’ reflections on the writing process. The findings indicate that students in both conditions largely relied on conventional patterns of tourism discourse and typical promotional formulations characteristic of the language of tourism. In texts produced with music, a somewhat greater use of experiential language was observed. Students’ reflections further reveal that most participants perceived music as stimulating and relaxing, as well as a factor that facilitated imagination and concentration during writing, although the differences between the two groups were not particularly substantial at the linguistic level. The paper suggests that music may contribute to a subjective sense of creativity and a more experiential approach to destination description; however, students still predominantly rely on previously acquired conventions of the tourism genre. The study contributes to research on ESP writing, tourism discourse and the influence of the teaching environment on students’ written expression.

This paper analyses dialogues in the video game The Last of Us: Part II and compares them to the lyrics of the game’s thematic song-anchor, ‘Through the Valley’. The Last of Us: Part II is an action-adventure and survival video game released in 2020 for PlayStation 4. It is a third-person shooter game set in a post-apocalyptic USA. The two playable characters, Ellie and Abby, must fight human enemies, zombie-like creatures called ‘Infected’, each other, but also their own fears and morality.

The main focus of this paper is the elements of epistemic and deontic modality and the syntactic profile of the dialogues and lyrics. The aim is to see whether the syntactic minimalism (frequent ellipsis, fragmentation, low syntactic embedding) and modality indicators (certainty, belief, confidence, permission, obligation, readiness) of the dialogues in the game are in stark contrast to the syntactic complexity and modality of the lyrics of the theme song in terms of expressing certainty-or the lack thereof.

In addition, we want to examine trauma as an articulation suppressor and music as a means of expressing the untold in traumatic circumstances, which is both therapeutic and unsettling for characters and the player, and how meaning emerges as the interplay between the two.

In terms of methodology, this research is stratified into a micro- and macro-level analysis, with the macro-level following van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach and epistemic discourse analysis (2014), and the multimodal discourse analysis approach by Kress & van Leeuwen (2001). The micro-level text analysis of modality and syntax is conducted within the framework of the interpersonal language metafunction, as suggested by Halliday & Matthiessen (2014), and that of traditional grammar (e.g. Quirk et al., 1985, Biber et al., 1999, Huddleston & Pullum, 2002).

As English Language Teaching (ELT) increasingly embraces inclusive principles, sociolinguistics offers valuable insights for more socially and linguistically responsive approaches. Drawing on key concepts such as language variation and multilingualism, as well as ELT approaches that foster critical language awareness, this paper explores the potential of song lyrics as authentic texts for classroom engagement.

Despite growing recognition of linguistic diversity, many ELT textbooks and teaching materials continue to prioritize standardized varieties of English, providing learners with limited opportunities to encounter the language as it is used across diverse communities and contexts. Through the analysis of selected contemporary songs, learners can examine features of non-standard English and reflect on how linguistic choices construct identities and convey social meanings. In this way, song lyrics can serve as entry points into key sociolinguistic themes at the intersection of language, power, identity and privilege.

The research proposes a thematic framework based on the analysis of selected songs, organized into categories for classroom use. The paper argues that integrating sociolinguistic perspectives into ELT through music can foster sociolinguistic awareness and promote a more inclusive understanding of English as a dynamic, global language.