“Overdosed on confidence” he laments on lolloping lead single ‘Headlines’: A Corpus-based study of lyric and vocal descriptive reporting verbs in online music reviews

Reporting verbs have been studied extensively in academic genres (Thompson & Ye, 1991; Thomas & Hawes, 1994; Eckstein et al., 2025). Consequently, existing typologies of reporting verbs are primarily grounded in academic discourse, emphasizing categories such as research, cognition, and discourse acts. Online music reviews represent an underexplored non academic genre where reporting verbs play a key role in describing both lyrical articulation and vocal delivery. In order to address this gap, the aim of this study is to identify reporting verbs pertaining to lyric and vocal description in online album reviews. The study makes use of a specialized corpus of English Online Album Reviews compiled for the purpose of the study. The corpus encompasses 240 music reviews amounting to approximately 168,000 tokens drawn from the following time ranges: 2011–2013 and 2021–2023. These are album reviews spanning five music genres, namely pop/R&B, rock, electronic, folk/country, and rap. The texts were drawn from three music reviewing platforms with a high number of monthly visitors according to Similarweb statistics (Pitchfork 10.8M, Slant Magazine 343.4K, NME 7.1M as of February 2025). The research questions guiding the study are: What reporting verbs are employed by professional music critics to characterize both the articulation of lyrical content and the vocal delivery of artists? What type of evaluation do these reporting verbs convey? It is a corpus based study combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. First, reporting verbs related to lyrics and vocals were extracted from the corpus with the use of AntConc (Anthony, 2024) and korpusomat.eu (Kieraś et al., 2018). In particular, the p frame s/he Vs on [X] was found to abound in reporting verbs pertaining to lyric and vocal description. It is a pattern with a personal pronoun (s/he), followed by a third person singular verb (Vs) and the preposition on, introducing either a song title or type, for example: “he laments on lolloping lead single ‘Headlines’.” Secondly, reporting verbs were tagged in QDA Miner using a typology tailored to online music reviews, adapted from academic genre frameworks by Hyland (1999) and Rawlins et al. (2024). This typology comprises the following categories: statement acts, cadence acts, and stance acts. Statement acts convey neutral lyrical output without stance, e.g., she says. Cadence acts refer to vocal texture, intensity, or flow, for example spits, howls, yawns. Stance acts encode the artist’s rhetorical posture or the reviewer’s interpretation of it, for instance boasts, proclaims, wonders, confesses. The frequency of verbs in each of the groups is reported. The differences in the distribution of reporting verbs based on the music genre (he spits in rap reviews vs. he croons in pop reviews) and the type of personal pronoun (he hollers vs. she bleats) are presented. Findings indicate that there is greater lexical variety in cadence and stance acts as opposed to statement acts, with statement acts being more repetitive. Since reporting verbs carry “evaluative potential” (Thompson & Ye, 1991, p. 369), the study sheds light on how evaluation operates in online public discourse and reflects broader digital cultures of evaluation (Jaakkola, 2024).