I'm a middle school teacher in California, and our class is doing a
project analyzing music lyrics. I'm looking for stastics that compare
these uses of the word "baby" in lyrics of all songs that are written
in English:

Percentage of uses that refer to an dating-age daughter

Percentage of uses that refer to a wife/girlfriend

I am speechless

Interesting project.  "dating-aged daughter":  do you mean a song
referring to a girl that age, versus older girlfriend or wife?  Or do
you mean a song from the perspective of a parent?

"all songs that are written in English":  that is a rather sweeping request.
I think you will have better luck if you can set some parameters. 
Researchers shy away from questions seeking or based on "all" of
something.

Good luck.

I don't think this is a do-able project, since it will require human
scrutiny of a huge amount of material. An automated search for the
word "baby" in song lyrics will not reveal context. I can't begin to
imagine how long it would take for a human to gather all song lyrics
in English that contain the word "baby," but adding the requirement
that the word's meaning in context will need to be determined makes
this an immense undertaking.

Pink-- I agree with you. This is a massive undertaking.
But if you happen to be near a library or a Barnes & Noble, you could
take a quick pass thru the book I've mentioned on here before, THE
GREEN BOOK OF SONGS BY SUBJECT, written by my brother.

The category of "BABY" will list songs with "Baby" in the title or
songs about babies -- literal and figurative.  Not that this will then
allow a breakdown into the age of each "baby," but with so many titles
in one place, it might help make an overview speculation.

It's little wonder our nation's education system is in the sorry state
it is in.  What, pray tell, is the purpose of this assignment?

And then there are the songs with "baby" that have no apparent
reference to females of any age:

"My baby baby, balla balla
My baby baby, balla balla
My baby baby, balla balla
My baby baby, balla balla
My baby baby, balla balla
Ooh balla balla."

"Baby Baby Balla Balla"
1st verse, "rainbows", 1966

Thanks to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an article today about
the coming soccer World Championship.

Baby can also refer to a male of undefined age.

When I was a teenager (early 60s) there was a lot of controversy about
the use of 'baby' in pop lyrics. It was almost a 'cause celebre'.

There was mockery at the prevalent fashion for singing to 'your baby'.
There was even some disquiet about whether teenage girls/young women
should ever be called 'baby' at all. And there was something highly
incongruous in the image of rough, violent, motor-biking
rock'n'rollers (who were often slashing cinema seats in riots on
Saturday nights) calling their girlfriends 'baby'.

Remember that in those days, for the first time ever, teenagers were
beginning to have significant pocket money - and were acquiring their
own form of popular music. Previously popular music had been directed
at adults and had dealt with adult themes ('Set 'em up Joe, it's a
quarter to four...etc' - Frank Sinatra in a sleezy bay, knocking back
whiskies).

We also had, at the time, the controversial film: 'Baby Doll'.

Into this controversy marched the Supremes in jackboots and candyfloss
with their world best-seller 'Baby Love'. 'Baby Love' took 'baby' as a
part of the lyric to a new extreme: 'Baby love, my baby love... baby,
baby, baby, baby, baby love, my baby love, why must we separate, my
love?'

So your question brings back the fondest memories of listening to the
latest Supremes' record in a listening booth in a record shop on the
way home from school at the age of 16, dazzled by the sheer
audaciousness (almost rebelliousness) of the lyric - and the sheer
loveliness/glamour/mystery of this group of girls with this strange
new sound!

Best of luck with your project!

A quick way you could complete your project would be to scan into an
OCR word-processing program the index to one of the many compilation
books of Top 20, Top 50, Top 100 hits of the last 50 years.

Save the file in Plain Text format. Then resave in Word format.

Edit the information you have captured, deleting everything except the
information you need.

Save the information in something like the following format with one line per song.

REERENCE NUMBER:TITLE:ARTIST:COMPOSER:DATE OF CHART ENTRY:HIGHEST
CHART POSITION;LENGTH OF TIME ON CHARTS:NOTES [or any other
information you need]

Create a table in 'Word', using colons as separators. Then sort the
information as you wish.

This will give you a list of songs. 

Individual research into the frequency of word occurences in each song
is as follows:

1)  Locate the song on a find-the-lyric type website, using the master
list you have created.
2)  Cut and paste the lyric into a word processing program.
3)  Save in Plain Text format.
4)  Resave in Word format.
5)  Reformat so that each word appears on a separate line [either do
this manually or create a macro to automate the task].
6)  Save as a table.
7)  Sort according to text.

This will give you the number of times the word 'baby' occurs. It will
also give you the frequency of the appearance of other words. You can
express the frequency of 'baby' either as a rank or percentage of the
whole.

A rank preference is more striking. 

I teach English to speakers of other languages and I use the method
with various texts in order to streamline the process of vocabulary
learning.

Re: nelson's comment. 

I do not know the exact purpose of dhom's assignment, but I use a
similar kind of exercise with first year university students in the
English composition courses that I teach. I've found it to be an
excellent way to introduce students to rhetorical analysis and help
them think about the way they use language in their own writing.
Beyond that, the exercise can be used as a tool for cultural analysis
with a number of applications, depending on the context of the
assignment. If dhom is doing such work with middle schoolers, I'm
impressed. It's hard enough to get 18-year-olds to look critically at
the language of popular culture.

Thanks for all of your comments!

Good question, myoarin.  I should have been clearer.  The question was
meant to ask for a comparison of the use of "baby" from the
perspective of the parent of a dating-age daughter vs. the perspective
of that person's boyfriend or spouse.

I'm willing to take a less comprehensive selection of the available
data for my answer.  I allowed the students to define this question. 
They have no experience looking at lexical data when analyzing songs
or other texts, and I figured that allowing them to define the
question would allow them to learn more in the process.

The original goal of my class project was to help students analyze
different forms of media to identify the message communicated by and
the philosophy undergirding each text.  As it turned out, some
students also had difficulties reading words in context and wanted to
obtain information about the usages of words such as "baby" in English
music in general to help them analyze specific songs.

I've raised the price to $20 and am willing to take data from a
narrower sample of songs, such as English pop songs written in
1980-2000.  I can be flexible here.  Thanks if you can help!

You might find this interesting:
http://www.geocities.com/tagonist/britneyanalysis/lyrics2.html

>> I've raised the price to $20 and am willing to take data from a
>> narrower sample of songs, such as English pop songs written in
>> 1980-2000.

As I mentioned above, the necessity of examining the context of the
word "baby" means that an automated search won't do the job. Even with
your limitation, the Researcher will need to find and read the lyrics
of thousands of songs.

The article below might be interesting to you, in a general way. The
author does make several observations about the occurence of the word
"baby" in his analysis, although he did not account statistically for
its specific lyrical context.

?Words of love and isolation: Individualism and alienation in popular
love songs, 1930-1999,? Thomas J. Scheff

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME04/Words_love_isolation.shtml