A Semantic and Syntactic JourneyThrough the Dylan Corpus

in meaning than its German counterpart. Compare: G ERMANIC L ATINATE deep dark clever hard high profound sombre intelligent difficult elevated Table 5: Germanic vs. Latinate adjectives What this points to is a marked tendency for Dylan’s adjectives to describe very concrete properties of very concrete objects. We’ll leave that aside, pending further research on adjective-noun collocations, and just end with one more remark on table 4: the only adjectives that stand out with respect to our reference corpus are numbers 7 and 8, last and dead , neither of which are to be found even in the top 50 in large corpora. From a thematic point of view, last is not interesting, as it is most often associated with night or time , only reflecting the deictic anchoring (the here and now ) of the stories told. Dead is a lot more revealing of the underlying obsessions that pervade Dylan’s lyrics, and is probably to be associated with the religious theme, all the more so as the majority of tokens are in fact nominalized adjectives,