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Analysis of 'Strangers In The Night' by Frank Sinatra

Strangers In The Night


Nominal Group Analysis

Findings

Meaning of the song
This song is a memory of how 2 strangers met and fell in love. The meaning of this song lies on how people are always unaware of the concept of love. You cannot force yourself to love someone because love is present everywhere. Their love was at first sight, and it shows how simple things, such as a glance, a smile, or a dance become magical, thanks to that special feeling.

Analysis of the Nominal Group structure

 

The lyrics of the song 'Strangers in the night' have a total of 37 nominal groups. Among these, we can find 15 simple nominal groups, 8 NGs with only premodification, 10 NGs with only postmodification, and 4 NGs having both pre and postmodification.


In terms of premodification, we find that there are 8 nominal groups. These are divided into those with the definite article 'the' (4), the demonstrative 'that' (2), one with possessive adjective plus numerative, and one with numerative plus describer.


The nominal groups that have only post modification are 10, 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 15 NGs, among which we can distinguish a considerable presence of pronouns, with 11 groups, and nouns, with 4 groups.

How do NG create meaning?
Keeping in mind that songs are written with the purpose of communicating something, we can deduce what the author wants to mean. However, since we all are different and think in different ways, the interpretation can change from person to person. Thus, the following analysis is only one of those infinite possibilities.

The use of nouns like “strangers” and “glance” provide us context about how the love starts to bloom. With the analysis of the post-modification of those nominal groups, we can also establish the circumstances of that first meeting between two people who fell in love at first sight.

By the mention of, apparently, physical attributes such as "something in your eyes" or "something in your smile" and the state of being like "two lonely people", Sinatra tries to justify the meeting, to give the reasons behind that intense feeling such as love. We can observe that the use of nominal groups, in this case, is planned not only to establish an image of the appearance of a person but to recreate a whole situation that involves not only people but time and even place.

Conclusions
  • Most nominal groups are pronouns.
  • There is no presence of indefinite articles. On the contrary, we can only find 4 definite articles or 'the' before the nouns.
  • The only describers found are adjectives of opinion. Among them, we can find 'lovely', 'warm', and 'embracing'.
  • There is a reduced number of numeratives within the nominal groups. There are only 2 elements, which are: 'two' and 'first'.
  • There is no presence of any classifier in the song.
  • Most postmodifications are made through prepositional phrases. However, there are sentences with the adverb 'away' after the main noun.

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