A Poetry of the Dispossessed and Fallen: a Quantitative Analysis of the Morphological and Syntactic Structures in Cannibal Corpse Titles

Abstract

This paper delves into the lyrical aspect of the band Cannibal Corpse by focusing on the notable formal units found in the titles of their songs and albums. The corpus features the entirety of Cannibal Corpse's recorded output, which were collected by accessing the band's profile page on the web-site “Encyclopeadia Metallum: The Metal Archives”. The aim of the paper is to showcase the specific structures found in these titles, and to determine how typical these structures are for the discography of Cannibal Corpse by presenting them in percentage figures. The paper initially introduces the main tenets of death metal as a style, as well as Cannibal Corpse in particular, with an emphasis on the lyrical aspect. Next, in the theoretical perspective of the research, it defines the lexical and phrasal forms found in the corpus of titles in linguistic terms. The structures from the corpus are classified into two larger units: lexical forms, and phrasal forms + coordinated structures, as well as the appropriate subunits; the structures are then systematized according to their frequency of occurrence expressed in percentages followed by the analysis of the figures. The paper seeks to ultimately arrive at the conclusion why such forms are used to coin titles in this band's body of work, and what specific meaning they carry, as well as what similar research ideas lie in the future, in order to better understand the relationship between the titles and the lyrical topics involved in this genre of music.