Kolln Ch. 4-5

Applying the Kolln principles
Ch. 4 illustrates cohesion via repetition (or lexical cohesion), the know-new contract, metadiscourse, and parallelism.

Original opening sentence, part II of critical paper:
“Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the dyad of the signifier and the signified in one of his general linguistics courses around 1911. This theory was later used scholars such as…”

New opening sentence, part II:
(All of the following is preceded by my introductory paragraphs, which attempt to explain the theories that support all the upcoming conjectures I’m about to make)
“Let’s get back to the relationship between the cover and the original [Repetition]. We’ve established that the cover song is the love child of artistic influence, and that bringing new meaning to preexisting material is accomplished via distinct individual experience (and therefore interpretation) [Know-New Contract/Parallelism]. In order to further dissect this concept, language as a structure of experience must be applied to the rhetorical situation of the cover song [New part of Know-new contract]. Therefore we must look at one of the inherent qualities of language: that of the signifier and signified, which can be scrutinized in terms of the cover song [Metadiscourse].

Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the dyad of the signifier and the signified in one of his general linguistics courses around 1911. This theory was later used scholars such as…”[This was the sentence that I originally had in the paper stood with no transition, I tried to add something less shocking to the reader than just shoving the theory in their face]

Ch. 5
I liked this chapter. Since I’ve been listening to a slew of various “Hallelujah”s for this paper, I completely understand the profound effect slight changes in intonation pattern, wording, end focus, various modes of placing emphasis, etc. can have on a piece—cover songs are distinct from their originals because of these elements.

One of the reasons Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah received so much acclaim was because of its changes in intonation, “It was Buckley's version on his 1994 album Grace that took the song into the canon. It was arguably the highlight of the album. Injecting the emotion of his trembling multi-octave vocals, the build-up to the line ‘Love is not a victory march/ It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah’ is devastating” (Bray, The Independent). This is interesting because while Kolln examines where the focus is by rearranging words (91-2), we can look at the cover song as rearranging focus through emphasis (since the words don’t change much, and the end focus does not switch as a result of wording).