Culinary Linguistics The chef’s special edited by Cornelia Gerhardt Maximiliane Frobenius Susanne Ley John Benjamins Publishing Company Culture and Language Use 10 Culinary Linguistics Volume 10 Culinary Linguistics. The chef ’s special Edited by Cornelia Gerhardt, Maximiliane Frobenius and Susanne Ley Culture and Language Use Studies in Anthropological Linguistics CLU-SAL publishes monographs and edited collections, culturally oriented grammars and dictionaries in the cross- and interdisciplinary domain of anthropological linguistics or linguistic anthropology. The series offers a forum for anthropological research based on knowledge of the native languages of the people being studied and that linguistic research and grammatical studies must be based on a deep understanding of the function of speech forms in the speech community under study. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/clu Editor Gunter Senft Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen Culinary Linguistics The chef ’s special Edited by Cornelia Gerhardt Maximiliane Frobenius Susanne Ley Saarland University John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Culinary Linguistics. The chef ’s special / Edited by Cornelia Gerhardt, Maximiliane Frobenius and Susanne Ley. p. cm. (Culture and Language Use, issn 1879-5838 ; v. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English language--Etymology. 2. English language--Terms and phrases. 3. Food-- Terminology. 4. Culture--Semiotic models. 5. Figures of speech. I. Gerhardt, Cornelia, editor of compilation. II. Frobenius, Maximiliane, editor of compilation. III. Hucklenbroich-Ley, Susanne, editor of compilation. PE1574.C85 2013 420.1’47--dc23 2013017136 isbn 978 90 272 0293 2 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 7171 6 (Eb) An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access isbn for this book is 978 90 272 7171 6. © 2013 – John Benjamins B.V. This e-book is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com 8 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Für Chef Menu Aperitivo Maximiliane Frobenius Overview of the volume xiii Antipasti Cornelia Gerhardt Food and language – language and food 3 Primi Piatti Genres of food discourse Stefan Diemer & Maximiliane Frobenius When making pie, all ingredients must be chilled. Including you: Lexical, syntactic and interactive features in online discourse – a synchronic study of food blogs 53 Delia Chiaro Passionate about food: Jamie and Nigella and the performance of food-talk 83 Kerstin Fischer The addressee in the recipe: How Julia Child gets to join you in the kitchen 103 Jenny Arendholz, Wolfram Bublitz, Monika Kirner & Iris Zimmermann Food for thought – or, what’s (in) a recipe? A diachronic analysis of cooking instructions 119 Stefan Diemer Recipes and food discourse in English – a historical menu 139 Claudia Bubel & Alice Spitz The way to intercultural learning is through the stomach – Genre-based writing in the EFL classroom 157 Secondi Piatti Food and culture Janet Holmes, Meredith Marra & Brian W. King How permeable is the formal-informal boundary at work? An ethnographic account of the role of food in workplace discourse 191 iii Menu Helga Kotthoff Comparing drinking toasts – Comparing contexts 211 Astrid M. Fellner The flavors of multi-ethnic North American literatures: Language, ethnicity and culinary nostalgia 241 Janet M. Fuller, Janelle Briggs & Laurel Dillon-Sumner Men eat for muscle, women eat for weight loss: Discourses about food and gender in Men’s Health and Women’s Health magazines 261 Stefan Karl Serwe, Kenneth Keng Wee Ong & Jean François Ghesquière “Bon Appétit, Lion City”: The use of French in naming restaurants in Singapore 281 Carrie A. Ankerstein & Gerardine M. Pereira Talking about taste: Starved for words 305 Dolci Bibliography 319 Index 345 This volume has been prepared for Neal R. Norrick on the occasion of his 65th birthday. 1 Neal R. Norrick holds the Chair of English linguistic at the English depart- ment of Saarland University, where he has spent most of his career. He received his doctorate from the University of Regensburg in 1978 and taught English linguistics at a number of German universities (Würzburg, Kassel, Hamburg, and Braunschweig) as well as at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on spoken English, with a particular attention to narrative as well as verbal humor, and is rooted in the wide field of pragmatics. His mono- graphs include Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk and the popular Conversational Narrative , which has recently been reprinted in paperback edition. He co-edited a handbook on phraseology and volumes on the Foundations of Pragmatics and on Humor in Interaction, which has also seen a reprint in paper- back. After many years as Special Issues Editor, he is now Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Pragmatics . He also serves on the Consultation Board of the Inter- national Pragmatics Association (IPrA) as well as on the editorial boards of a number of journals from the fields of pragmatics and humor studies (e.g. Text and Talk and Humor ). In this millennium only, he has published more than 50 articles in peer- reviewed journals and edited volumes reflecting his manifold interests in language in use, its forms and functions, including topics as diverse as conjunctions, inter- jections, pragmatic markers, tellability, swearing, remembering, listener prac- tices, similes, scripted performances, laughter, conflict, and the construction of identities in talk. Uniting his two passions, language and cooking, he has worked on recipes as early as 1983. His recent addition to the field of culinary linguistics is on “Conversational recipe telling” (2011). The articles in this volume were written and assembled as a token of gratitude and affection for our teacher, mentor and colleague. 1. We would like to thank the student helpers of English linguistics, above all Isabel Schul and Daniel Recktenwald, for their help, and also our colleagues at the English department of Saarland University and everybody else for not “spilling the beans.” Aperitivo Overview of the volume Maximiliane Frobenius Saarland University The present volume contains a collection of original research articles from mul- tiple disciplines, revolving around the common theme of language and food and the manifestation of the two within their cultural framework. This section gives a brief overview of the general structure of the volume and of the individual contributions. Similar to the intricate task of composing a four course meal for invited guests, the assembling of an edited volume demands a sense of “what goes together.” The metaphor of the menu serves as the vehicle for the order of contri- butions: we start with an introduction to the whole field of research (Antipasti), move on to contributions in the form of original research articles (Primi Piatti and Secondi Piatti), and close with a bibliography of language and food (Dolci). The first set of articles, Primi Piatti, has been grouped together for its clear focus on language as it is used in specific genres whose main themes are food related. These encompass both spoken and written genres in both electronically mediated settings and printed or even hand-written documents. The second set, Secondi Piatti, represents research on food related language use within specific cultural settings, where it represents a tool to shape and construct the context it is situated in. These contexts range from the perpetuation of gender roles, controlling the degree of formality in a work setting, or expressing a commercial register through the naming of businesses. Thus, we might say that the Primi Piatti contributions work from a more specifically linguistic perspective, or a micro-level analysis, compared to the Secondi Piatti studies, which take a macro-level stance in that they investigate phenomena of the cultural setting and therefore go beyond a purely linguistic analysis. Gerhardt’s introduction to this volume, our mouthwatering Antipasti , repre- sents an extensive review of the literature revolving around food and food practices. It begins with the interdisciplinary study of food in various fields and subsequently closes in on the more focused description of language studies pertaining to food and its discourses. Primi Piatti is headed by Diemer and Frobenius , “ When making pie, all ingre- dients must be chilled. Including you”: Lexical, syntactic and interactive features xi Maximiliane Frobenius in online discourse – a synchronic study of food blogs . This study of food blogs illuminates the written CMC (computer-mediated communication) genre using a hybrid approach. The qualitative analysis of addressee directed language con- firms the primarily interactive character of the genre blog. The quantitative study of the Food Blog Corpus (FBC) is the basis for a lexical and syntactic analysis, which provides information on the use and frequencies of (1) CMC related phe- nomena: innovative vocabulary and spelling; (2) food related jargon: specialized vocabulary, grammatical patterns; (3) phenomena related to spoken interaction: discourse markers, hedges and address. Chiaro Passionate about food: Jamie and Nigella and the performance of food-talk presents research on the genre of TV cookery shows. Following a brief history of this genre on British television, the study moves on to investigate two popular TV chefs and their (linguistic) presentation skills in more detail. The comparison of Nigella Lawson’s and Jamie Oliver’s verbal output examines fea- tures such as their choice of lexis, how they give instructions, their use of vague language and how they display emotion. The analysis of the two chefs’ programs reveals that these shows’ popularity is based on the entertainment value of the presenters as much as (or more than) the preparation of dishes that can be learned from them. Fischer demonstrates the applicability of the notion of recipient design to the text type recipe in The addressee in the recipe: How Julia Child gets to join you in the kitchen . The comparison of four cook books, including Julia Child’s famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking , is an important contribution towards a more thorough description of strategies of reader involvement in document design. The analysis reveals the provision of background knowledge, the pointing out of vari- ous alternatives in the cooking process, and the anticipation of potentially prob- lematic situations a cook may encounter as major strategies to instantiate and acknowledge the presence of the reader. Arendholz, Bublitz, Kirner, and Zimmermann Food for thought – or, what’s (in) a recipe? A diachronic analysis of cooking instructions compares two recipes of the same dish, one from Middle English, the other from a contemporary source, i.e. Jamie Oliver’s website. The study points out the difficulties such a compari- son entails regarding a functional analysis; the formal analysis reveals parallels in terms of, e.g. syntactic constructions and lexical codification. The historical linguistics perspective is continued by Diemer Recipes and food discourse in English – a historical menu . The contribution provides a diachronic overview of the discourse of food on the basis of various examples of recipes and more general food related texts from Old English to the late 20th century. It traces lexis, syntax and discourse features and thereby illustrates several tendencies, such as the focus on a less and less professional audience, the gradual introduction of Overview of the volume x more precise measurements and more procedural detail, and an overall reduction in lexical complexity. Bubel and Spitz The way to intercultural learning is through the stomach – Genre-based writing in the EFL classroom discusses the text type recipe as a genre that can be fruitfully used in classroom settings to develop intercultural commu- nicative competence. The analysis of the students’ products proved the effective- ness of the teaching approach, in that the leaners’ writings contained most of the key features of typical English-language recipes, and in that the series of lessons reported on had the effect of raising students’ awareness of their own food cultures as well as those of the English-speaking world. In summary, Primi Piatti is a set of papers that each investigates one particular food-related genre. It covers the text type recipe in its written form both diachron- ically as well as synchronically in several contexts. Furthermore, spoken discourse on TV and the relatively new genre food blog, as mediated genres, form the data of some of the contributions. Secondi Piatti starts with Holmes, Marra and King How permeable is the formal-informal boundary at work? An ethnographic account of the role of food in workplace discourse . From this paper we learn that talk about food makes a contri- bution similar to that of other aspects of relational workplace interaction, such as humor, small talk and narrative. These tend to occur at the boundaries of interac- tion, which they help construct. Talk about food generates informality, such that when it occurs as a legitimate, socially sanctioned topic for meetings, it causes interactional trouble. Kotthoff Comparing drinking toasts – Comparing contexts is a study on toast- ing practices in Georgia, Russia and Sweden, where the toasting tradition is central to everyday life, and Germany and the Netherlands, where toasting plays a comparatively smaller role. Toasts are generally characterized as ‘doing culture’; this practice is co-ordinated by the tamada in the Georgian tradition, a master of ceremony, who controls the degree of formality. The study finds that foreigners to a culture tend to adapt choosing humorous toasts and/or fulfill the minimal genre standards, which is met with acceptance by the host culture. This practice indexes both affiliation and connection as well as otherness. Fellner The flavors of multi-ethnic North American Literatures: language, ethnicity and culinary nostalgia adopts a literary and cultural critic’s perspective in analyzing the function of culinary nostalgia in narratives of dislocation. The discussion of three contemporary texts by multi-ethnic North American authors reveals that the evocation of food goes beyond acting as a language for expressing nostalgia, in that it functions to structure the narrators’ ambivalent relationship to ethnicity. As transmitter of affect, it is argued, narrative descriptions of food and food preparation engage culinary citizenship xi Maximiliane Frobenius Fuller, Briggs and Dillon-Sumner Men eat for muscle, women eat for weight loss: Discourses about food and gender in Men’s Health and Women’s Health maga- zines discusses the construction of hegemonic femininities and masculinities with regard to food choices as found in two magazines targeted at women and men respectively. The qualitative study shows how the notions of guilt and morality are closely linked to food consumption, and that articles and ads in those magazines employ them to create hetero-normative identities that depict women as in need of controlling their eating behavior and men as under pressure to perform. Serwe, Ong and Ghesquière “Bon Appétit, Lion City”: The use of French in naming restaurants in Singapore explores the use of French on restaurant signs in Singapore, giving both a quantitative and qualitative account of the forms and meanings of the names in relation to their respective business. The study uncovers a correspondence between the idiomaticity/mixing of languages and the type of food served: monolingual, idiomatic French names predominantly belong to res- taurants specializing in French food; multilingual, non-idiomatic names often denote cafes or bakeries selling non-French food. Ankerstein and Pereira Talking about Taste: starved for words is a psycholin- guistic study of the taste vocabulary of English speakers. It challenges the assump- tion that words map directly onto physiological and psychological constructs, as the tasks this research is based on show that participants’ knowledge of taste is far greater than their use of taste words suggests. The morphological properties of these lexemes, and their use are explored through collocation searches in the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). To sum up, Secondi Piatti combines papers that approach the study of food discourse and food genres as they are embedded in larger discourse patterns and (cross-) cultural settings. This section thus contributes to our understanding of the effects these genres have on societal structures in that they can be employed as tools to express various kinds of meaning. Dolci , our comprehensive Bibliography: Food and language represents the final section of this volume. Antipasti Ich esse selbst täglich. (Loriot) Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es. (Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin) I will not dwell upon ragouts or roasts, Albeit all human history attests That happiness for man – the hungry sinner! – Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner. (Lord Byron) Food and language – language and food Cornelia Gerhardt Saarland University 1. Introduction Eating and talking are universal human traits. Every healthy human being eats and talks; every society or group eats and talks. Both language and food are culturally dependent and vary according to factors such as gender, age, or situational context, or even lifestyle. There are vast differences both in the food-related behavior of different cultures as well as in the languages of the world. There is nothing natu- ral or inevitable about food preferences or syntactic structures. “Food is a bridge between nature and culture” (Fischler 1988 in Germov & Williams 2008: 1) 1 and so is language. Brillat-Savarin, one of the earliest food writers, claimed: “Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are” (1825: 3). Again, linguists and other social scientists have shown that identity is constructed through language. Hence, “every coherent social group has its own unique foodways” (Counihan 1999: 6) and its own unique language use. You are different or you are the same depending on what you eat and how you speak. “If we are to understand women’s gender roles..., we need to study food” (Inness 2001a: 4) and, the linguist adds, language. “If there is one issue as deeply personal as food it is language and dialect” (Delamont 1995: 193). 1. All references in the introductory chapter can be found in the bibliography Dolci at the end of this volume.