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Analysis of 'Thinking Out Loud' by Ed Sheeran

Thinking Out Loud


Structural Nominal Group Analysis

Findings

Meaning of the song
The song is trying to communicate how true love can cross all kinds of difficulties. No matter how time changes our appearance, beliefs, or fame, even if we become weak, the important thing is to feel the same love as when we were young. Ed Sheeran uses this romantic story, between 2 people, to show us how love can last forever and can be found in ways people can't understand.

Analysis of the Nominal Group structure


The lyrics of the song 'Thinking Out Loud' have a total of 86 nominal groups. Among these, we can find 52 simple nominal groups, 22 NGs with only premodification, 2 NGs with only postmodification, and 10 NGs with both pre and postmodification.


In terms of premodification, we find that there are 22 nominal groups. These are divided into those with the possessive adjectives 'my' and 'your' (12), the definite article 'the' (4), the describer 'mysterious' (2), 3 units of nominal groups composed of possessive adjectives plus describers, and finally, the numerative 'every single'.


The nominal groups that have only post modification are 2, and all of them adopt the characteristic of being prepositional phrases.

The largest number of nominal groups in the song is simple. In total, there are 52 NGs, among which we can distinguish a large presence of pronouns, with 36 units, as well as nouns, with 16 units.

How do NGs create meaning?
Taking into account that this is a subjective work, the following appreciations are based on our opinions of how we understand the song.

We could say that the Nominal Groups we found, within the song, play specific roles that give sense to the lyric.

At the beginning of the song, we found that most of the nominal groups are simple. We interpret this as the way the writer wanted to describe specific changes by the time, in the body of his lover, with the purpose to highlight that even with those changes he will still love her.

Then the author introduces their "love story" with the expression "how people fall in love in mysterious ways", followed by the use of pronouns as "me" and "you", in order to describe the situation and expose the people involved in it.

On the other hand, the use of nouns with post modification show us how phenomena occur from the point of view of a person who is in love. To demonstrate this situation, the nominal group “Kiss me under the light of a thousand stars” is not something usual to say.

Conclusion
  • Most nominal groups are simple, in fact most of them are pronouns.
  • We can observe a little use of articles, there are only four and the four of them correspond to the definite article "the".
  • Most of the elements in premodication are possessive adjectives such as "your" and "my" 
  • The song counts with the presence of only one numerative "all"
  • Despite the nature of the song, only five describers were found, two of them were alone, and they correspond to the word "mysterious" and the remaining three follow the order of: possessive adjectives + describers as in "your loving..."
  • The only two postmodifications found in the song are prepositional phrases, there is no use of finite or non-finite clauses as postmodificators.

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