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Article published In: Food and terminology: Expressing sensory experience in several languages
Edited by Rita Temmerman and Danièle Dubois
[Terminology 23:1] 2017
► pp. 155–179

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Food terminology as a system of cultural communication

 | University of Granada |
 | University of Salamanca |
Published online: 10 November 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.23.1.07fab
In this study on food terminology and culture, Frame-based Terminology Theory (FBT) ( (ed). 2012. A Cognitive Linguistics View of Terminology and Specialized Language. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, 2015. “Frames as a Framework for Terminology.” In Handbook of Terminology, Vol. 11, ed. by Hendrik J. Kockaert and Frieda Steurs, 14–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) was combined with corpus analysis to explore the use of culture-specific terms in the food categories of bread and rice. For the sake of comparison, semplates (Levinson, Samuel C., and Niclas Burenhult. 2009. “Semplates: A New Concept in Lexical Semantics?” Language 851: 153–174. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Burenhult, Niclas (ed). 2008. “Language and Landscape: Geographical Ontology in Cross-Linguistic Perspective.” Language Sciences 30 (2/3).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) were formulated for food, bread, and rice, as a kind of cultural frame to highlight the relatedness of these categories, based on the actions that were most frequently linked to them in our corpus. For this purpose, an FBT semantic analysis of these terms in a general language corpus was combined with an analysis of their cultural contexts in the literary work of authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Najat El Hachmi, Chimamanda Adichie, and others. The situations portrayed in their novels reflect the cultural embeddedness of food and its communicative value.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Food, culture, and language
    • 2.2Frame-based terminology
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1Corpus
    • 3.2Sketch engine
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Food semplate parameters
    • 4.2Bread
      • 4.2.1Bread: EnTenTen corpus data
      • 4.2.2 Literary corpus: La filla estrangera [The Foreign Daughter]
      • 4.2.3 Literary corpus: “Bien Pretty”
    • 4.3Rice
      • 4.3.1Rice: EnTenTen corpus data
      • 4.3.2 Literary corpus: Americanah
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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