Lexical-Semantic Features of Musical Culturonyms

This study investigates the lexical-semantic features of musical culturonyms—lexical items that denote culturally specific concepts related to music, such as genres, instruments, performers, movements, and musical traditions. Drawing from a corpus of 150 terms, the research employs methods from lexical semantics, cultural linguistics, and corpus analysis to classify and analyze the semantic structures, etymologies, and contextual uses of these terms in English and cross-linguistically. The findings reveal that musical culturonyms are semantically stratified units with both denotative and connotative layers of meaning. Many of them originate as loanwords or untranslated borrowings that retain strong cultural identities, such as flamenco, sitar, or opera. Others, such as punk, hip-hop, or K-pop, have developed polysemous meanings that extend beyond the musical domain into ideology, fashion, and identity politics. Corpus-based analysis further shows that these terms exhibit distinctive collocational behavior, reflecting their embeddedness in specific cultural discourses.