The Lexical and Contextual Meaning Olivia Rodrigo’s Top Ten Billboard Songs 2021

Abstract

This study aims to uncover the lexical and contextual meaning of the song titles repeated several times when sung in the chorus. Besides, these titles also have catchy vibes and easily gaining attention from the listeners due to using daily spoken words. The two songs popularized by Olivia Rodrigo titled ‘Déjà vu’ and ‘Good for you’ are used as the source of the data.  The data is mostly the titles of the songs and the whole lyrics to uncover the main theme to understanding the song message deeper. The theme acts as the soul of the song crucially required to understand both the meaning lexical and contextual. The data of this research is collected through qualitative method by web browsing on Billboard official pages, browsing the songs, listen to it both online and offline and analyzing the already downloaded lyrics of these two songs. Once the data had been compiled, using the theory of Semantics from Charles W. Kreidler in his book Introducing English Semantics combined with other theories focusing on Lexical and Contextual meaning e.g. Linguistic Semantic by John Lyons, Geoffrey Leech and other related theories, it is discovered that the contextual meaning of the title in relation to the whole body theme of the song effectively delivers the idea of mostly love sarcasm that has become catchy and easily digested by the listeners. This contextual meaning is totally separated from its lexical one. Discovering this will lead the listeners to understand as well as comprehend how the song writers play with the words and make it top ten billboard charts