"It's a battle of words": A stylistic analysis of antiwar lyrics

The present study analyses a corpus of around one hundred antiwar lyrics composed in the last decades in order to investigate how linguistic and rhetorical strategies encode the experience of conflicts and demystify the war-as-a-humanitarian-mission ideology. The stylistic approach, which is also reliant on a language software application (Wordsmith Tools), aims to highlight how strategic use of personal pronouns and modals, combined with the vagueness of the narrative categories of time, place and action resulting from the highly elliptical encoding of songs, can create narrative slots meant to involve the recipients in the “war game.”