A Pragmatic Study of Nicki Minaj’s Songs: A Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

Songs are considered one of the essentials of human life nowadays because they have occupied social media. It can be seen by surfing social apps such Instagram, Facebook, or by listening to them directly on YouTube or other apps such as Spotify and others. It is aimed to fill a gap in empirical studies by conducting pragmatic analyses of Nicki Minaj's songs, focusing on the lack of such studies to the best of the researchers' knowledge. Therefore, Nicki Minaj's tops albums songs are analyzed pragmatically through the years 2015-2024. To do so, Searle’s speech act classification (1986) and Salager's (1997) classification of hedges are applied to know which are the most frequently used speech acts and hedges type and why. However, a corpus software Antconc is used in order not to be biased and to have reliable results. The results show that the female rapper Nicki Minaj utilizes directive speech most frequently and commissives. For hedges the study shows the modal auxiliary verbs and if clauses as the most used types of hedges. It is shown that the rapper employs specific terms such as “wanna, gotta” terms ending with “in” instead of “ing” to convey the idea that female rappers have the power to alter the public's perception of them. Rappers that are women can perform just like men and have their tracks ranked at the top of the Billboard charts. In addition, the use of hedges in their songs helps female rappers to establish their individuality, which is consistent with Lakoff's (1975) theory of female speech.