Lexico-Semantic Features in Music Instruction Discourse

This study investigates the lexico-semantic features of spoken discourse in individual music lessons across five instruments: drum, guitar, piano, saxophone, and violin. A 609,000-word corpus (MuLesCo) was compiled from YouTube-based lessons and analyzed using the UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS). An inter-domain comparison with the Open American National Corpus (OANC) of Spoken revealed that music instruction constitutes a distinctive pedagogical register characterized by procedural, anatomical, auditory, and evaluative vocabulary. Intra-domain analysis further showed that modality-specific demands, such as breath control in saxophone, finger precision in guitar and piano, and bowing technique in violin, shape the lexical patterns of instructional talk in systematic ways. While USAS successfully identified dominant semantic domains, it frequently misclassified polysemous terms. These misclassifications highlighted both the limitations of general-purpose taggers in specialized discourse and their pedagogical value for raising awareness of semantic flexibility. The findings suggest that music instructional discourse offers a valuable resource for content and language integrated learning and corpus-informed pedagogy by providing authentic, context-sensitive input. At the same time, the study underscores the need for domain-adapted Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. By demonstrating how linguistic form and musical function intersect, this research contributes to applied corpus linguistics and music pedagogy.