Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Susanne Mühleisen
[IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 47] 2020
► pp. 167–188
The paper presents the construction of two types of expert identity in conversations about food: cultural expertise and culinary expertise. The study is based on data from a corpus of informal dyadic conversations between international speakers of English as a Lingua Franca via Skype. Both cultural and culinary expertise are established and negotiated in a broader identity context. The study shows that the discursive construction of expert identity is a complex dynamic phenomenon that takes place on multiple levels, ranging from lexical choice and the organization of discourse to the employment of pragmatic strategies and negotiation processes. The paper illustrates the key role food plays in identity creation in an online video-mediated setting.