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Part of
The Language of Food in Japanese: Cognitive perspectives and beyond
Edited by Kiyoko Toratani
[Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 25] 2022
► pp. 263–291

Chapter 9
Verbs of seasoning in Japanese, with special reference to the locative alternation in English

| Kogakuin University of Technology & Engineering, Academic Support Center

This chapter identifies verbs of seasoning from the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese and divides them into two types: those taking the seasoning as direct object (e.g., shio o furikakeru ‘sprinkle salt’) and those marking the seasoning with the instrumental case (e.g., shio de ajituke suru ‘season (something) with salt’). While some verbs of seasoning in English participate in the locative alternation (e.g., Sprinkle salt over the meat vs. Sprinkle the meat with salt), Japanese has considerably fewer alternating verbs, requiring the use of different verbs in the realm of seasoning. The difference is accounted for in light of “fashions of speaking” (e.g., Ikegami, 1985).

Keywords: culinary expression, recipe, verbs of seasoning, Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ), locative alternation, English-Japanese comparison
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cooking and grammar
    • 2.1Why study culinary expressions?
    • 2.2Previous studies on culinary expressions
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Verbs of seasoning
    • 4.1Verbs expressing addition, coating, rubbing, and mixing
    • 4.2Suru
    • 4.3Verbs for arranging and attaching
  • 5.Constructions
    • 5.1Japanese verbs of seasoning and their English counterparts
    • 5.2From the viewpoint of fashions of speaking
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/celcr.25.09non
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