Food plays a central role in hospitality in virtually every culture on earth. Eating together – “commensality” is perhaps one of the most basic human social acts, and is imbued with a special ritual quality. In this paper I show that there are several stages that participants in commensality pass through from the outside world to the communal meal. The passage from stage to stage is effected through the use of linguistic/ behavioral routines that I call “pragmemic triggers.” The form of these triggers is different for different societies, but their structure and use is the same. To demonstrate this, I compare the passage to the meal in four widely dispersed cultures: Middle East, Japanese, German and American.
This paper explores the overall structural organization of dining activity by analyzing conversations videotaped in sushi restaurants in Japan. It illustrates that a single dining activity at a sushi restaurant has a structural organization that is composed of three phases: (1) an opening, (2) a continuing state of incipient ordering/ talk, and (3) a closing, which has a reference to the single overall unit of dining. These phases are constructed and delimited by conversational practices with bodily orientation through which dining parties demonstrate their orientation to the overall organization. This paper contributes to our understanding of people’s fine-tuned coordination through body and talk by utilizing projection and recognition of the other’s actions as a resource.
Analysis of 105 Japanese taste descriptions gathered from observation of conversations at a potluck party and responses on written surveys at the party and in a workplace shows that speakers go beyond the common oisii ‘(it)’s tasty’ in their socialization through food sharing. The descriptions included specific descriptions of flavor, texture, and references to personal experiences related to food. The use of the word hutuu ‘ordinary’ had a more positive connotation than has been traditionally associated with this word. Results validated Ohashi’s (2010) market research finding that onomatopoeic expressions have been replacing more traditional clausal descriptions of food texture. This research suggests the pedagogical usefulness of the strategy of relating food being shared to personal experiences and concrete sensory expressions.
This study examines loanwords, coined native words and code-switching in taster meal conversations and how their use relates to food identity and linguistic identity in Wolof and Eegimaa (two languages spoken in Senegal). The analysis reveals that the use of loanwords by Wolof and Eegimaa participants in food assessment is not always motivated by practical reasons. In many cases, foreign words are used to refer to foreign food as a demarcation/ evaluation strategy to distance the participants from the foreign food which is viewed as a symbol of foreign culture. Results clearly show that not only the food people eat, but also the kind of language they use to describe it constitute a means for expressing their sense of membership in a community.
This study investigates how Japanese and American English speakers use modal/ evidential forms and body movments to identify and assess an unfamiliar drink at a taster lunch. Results show that the Japanese used more sensory evidential forms, truth approximation forms, and final particles to request agreement, while Americans used more forms to express their personal belief/ opinion directly. A comparison of the conversational development in which belief/ opinion forms were used showed that while Americans used I think in successive utterances, Japanese speakers used to omou ‘(I) think’ after a differing opinion(s) had been expressed to finalize their opinion and summarize the discussion. Results contribute to research on modality/ evidentiality in conversational interaction, cross-cultural understanding, and language and food.
This study investigates how categorization of food is formed around participants’ experiences in their daily lives in spontaneous face-to-face conversations between Japanese native speakers. Building on previous studies on categorization in conversation analysis and cognitive psychology, this study examines how participants collaboratively share, negotiate, and create categories through talk about familiar and unfamiliar food in the emerging interaction. The analyses demonstrate that participants deploy socio-culturally categorized food in order to co-construct their temporal/ spatial concepts, identity, and personal/ social events, and that they utilize categorized food in order to achieve mutual understanding on unfamiliar food in talk-in-interaction. This study sheds light on the cognitive and interactional processes involved in the activity of categorization for group solidarity through conversational practices in social interaction.
Drawing on research on repetition in storytelling (Jefferson et al., 1987; Norrick, 2000; Georgakopoulou, 2007), I demonstrate how words and phrases in punch lines about food and restaurants can acquire evaluative or symbolic meanings in a storytelling among three Japanese women. I also show how later in the conversation participants use these words and phrases to comment on their taste and to evaluate a story utilizing the original evaluative or symbolic meanings of these words and phrases. This study shows how the ubiquity of talk about food and restaurants allows the participants to use words and phrases from punch lines as a device to show their understanding of one another and suggests how this can be a group bonding exercise in talk-in-interaction.
This paper contributes to research on the socialization of disgust responses by examining the ways in which preschool children (up to and including 5-year-olds) and their parents enact disgust in video recordings of family mealtimes in England and Scotland using a discursive psychological approach. I demonstrate that, in this context, preschool children predominantly use the disgust marker yuck whereas adults most commonly utter eugh. Preschool children’s yuck utterances are typically ignored by parents, treated as humorous or as attention-seeking behavior. I argue that preschool children are not treated as having the right to “know” disgust. The paper aims to stimulate debate in research on food and disgust, and of the role of language and social interaction in children’s eating practices.
This paper examines children’s early experiences with food in Japan. Focusing on meal and snack time in and around households and a preschool, it identifies three practices across these settings – talking about food, finishing all of one’s food, and behaving properly at the table – and examines the verbal (e.g. pragmatic particles, passive) and non-verbal resources (e.g. pointing), and strategies (e.g. assessment, reported speech) that caregivers and peers deploy in socializing children to these practices. The findings reveal how speakers deploy language resources and strategies within activities surrounding food to socialize children into how to feel towards and relate to others, food, and food-related objects.
American English-speaking preschoolers reinscribe implicit understandings of gender prescriptions in their food-related talk and pretend play. Girls discussed and coordinated complex, sequenced meal preparation, sometimes explicitly as mother or child. Boys’ food-as-comestible play was shorter and less developed. They imaginatively transported themselves to places outside of the home setting (to a swamp, a spaceship), planning and enacting scripts of gender normative adventure and danger, in which food was symbolically transformed for use in nondomestic, noncomestible activities, e.g., a piece of bread becomes a camera. Boys also style-shifted linguistically, but usually in non-family roles. This study contributes to research on preschooler’s gendered social language and spontaneous symbolic play, and to research concerned with the meanings children ascribe to food and eating.
This paper investigates the socialization into healthy food practices in a Danish multi-ethnic kindergarten classroom within the frameworks of Linguistic Ethnography (Creese, 2008; Rampton, Maybin & Tusting, 2007) and Language Socialization (Ochs, 1988; Schieffelin, 1990). I present micro-analyses of three situations where the health value of milk, water, and juice is topicalized. Health is a moral concept which is culturally embedded but linguistically constructed and negotiated. I discuss how learning outcomes in health educational activities depend on individuals’ understandings prior to interactions and on the process of co-ordinating understandings. Also, in children’s conversations nutritional value becomes an interactional resource. The paper contributes to prior research with a micro-analytic perspective on the role of health education in wider processes of social exclusion and intercultural (mis)understandings.
Food plays a central role in hospitality in virtually every culture on earth. Eating together – “commensality” is perhaps one of the most basic human social acts, and is imbued with a special ritual quality. In this paper I show that there are several stages that participants in commensality pass through from the outside world to the communal meal. The passage from stage to stage is effected through the use of linguistic/ behavioral routines that I call “pragmemic triggers.” The form of these triggers is different for different societies, but their structure and use is the same. To demonstrate this, I compare the passage to the meal in four widely dispersed cultures: Middle East, Japanese, German and American.
This paper explores the overall structural organization of dining activity by analyzing conversations videotaped in sushi restaurants in Japan. It illustrates that a single dining activity at a sushi restaurant has a structural organization that is composed of three phases: (1) an opening, (2) a continuing state of incipient ordering/ talk, and (3) a closing, which has a reference to the single overall unit of dining. These phases are constructed and delimited by conversational practices with bodily orientation through which dining parties demonstrate their orientation to the overall organization. This paper contributes to our understanding of people’s fine-tuned coordination through body and talk by utilizing projection and recognition of the other’s actions as a resource.
Analysis of 105 Japanese taste descriptions gathered from observation of conversations at a potluck party and responses on written surveys at the party and in a workplace shows that speakers go beyond the common oisii ‘(it)’s tasty’ in their socialization through food sharing. The descriptions included specific descriptions of flavor, texture, and references to personal experiences related to food. The use of the word hutuu ‘ordinary’ had a more positive connotation than has been traditionally associated with this word. Results validated Ohashi’s (2010) market research finding that onomatopoeic expressions have been replacing more traditional clausal descriptions of food texture. This research suggests the pedagogical usefulness of the strategy of relating food being shared to personal experiences and concrete sensory expressions.
This study examines loanwords, coined native words and code-switching in taster meal conversations and how their use relates to food identity and linguistic identity in Wolof and Eegimaa (two languages spoken in Senegal). The analysis reveals that the use of loanwords by Wolof and Eegimaa participants in food assessment is not always motivated by practical reasons. In many cases, foreign words are used to refer to foreign food as a demarcation/ evaluation strategy to distance the participants from the foreign food which is viewed as a symbol of foreign culture. Results clearly show that not only the food people eat, but also the kind of language they use to describe it constitute a means for expressing their sense of membership in a community.
This study investigates how Japanese and American English speakers use modal/ evidential forms and body movments to identify and assess an unfamiliar drink at a taster lunch. Results show that the Japanese used more sensory evidential forms, truth approximation forms, and final particles to request agreement, while Americans used more forms to express their personal belief/ opinion directly. A comparison of the conversational development in which belief/ opinion forms were used showed that while Americans used I think in successive utterances, Japanese speakers used to omou ‘(I) think’ after a differing opinion(s) had been expressed to finalize their opinion and summarize the discussion. Results contribute to research on modality/ evidentiality in conversational interaction, cross-cultural understanding, and language and food.
This study investigates how categorization of food is formed around participants’ experiences in their daily lives in spontaneous face-to-face conversations between Japanese native speakers. Building on previous studies on categorization in conversation analysis and cognitive psychology, this study examines how participants collaboratively share, negotiate, and create categories through talk about familiar and unfamiliar food in the emerging interaction. The analyses demonstrate that participants deploy socio-culturally categorized food in order to co-construct their temporal/ spatial concepts, identity, and personal/ social events, and that they utilize categorized food in order to achieve mutual understanding on unfamiliar food in talk-in-interaction. This study sheds light on the cognitive and interactional processes involved in the activity of categorization for group solidarity through conversational practices in social interaction.
Drawing on research on repetition in storytelling (Jefferson et al., 1987; Norrick, 2000; Georgakopoulou, 2007), I demonstrate how words and phrases in punch lines about food and restaurants can acquire evaluative or symbolic meanings in a storytelling among three Japanese women. I also show how later in the conversation participants use these words and phrases to comment on their taste and to evaluate a story utilizing the original evaluative or symbolic meanings of these words and phrases. This study shows how the ubiquity of talk about food and restaurants allows the participants to use words and phrases from punch lines as a device to show their understanding of one another and suggests how this can be a group bonding exercise in talk-in-interaction.
This paper contributes to research on the socialization of disgust responses by examining the ways in which preschool children (up to and including 5-year-olds) and their parents enact disgust in video recordings of family mealtimes in England and Scotland using a discursive psychological approach. I demonstrate that, in this context, preschool children predominantly use the disgust marker yuck whereas adults most commonly utter eugh. Preschool children’s yuck utterances are typically ignored by parents, treated as humorous or as attention-seeking behavior. I argue that preschool children are not treated as having the right to “know” disgust. The paper aims to stimulate debate in research on food and disgust, and of the role of language and social interaction in children’s eating practices.
This paper examines children’s early experiences with food in Japan. Focusing on meal and snack time in and around households and a preschool, it identifies three practices across these settings – talking about food, finishing all of one’s food, and behaving properly at the table – and examines the verbal (e.g. pragmatic particles, passive) and non-verbal resources (e.g. pointing), and strategies (e.g. assessment, reported speech) that caregivers and peers deploy in socializing children to these practices. The findings reveal how speakers deploy language resources and strategies within activities surrounding food to socialize children into how to feel towards and relate to others, food, and food-related objects.
American English-speaking preschoolers reinscribe implicit understandings of gender prescriptions in their food-related talk and pretend play. Girls discussed and coordinated complex, sequenced meal preparation, sometimes explicitly as mother or child. Boys’ food-as-comestible play was shorter and less developed. They imaginatively transported themselves to places outside of the home setting (to a swamp, a spaceship), planning and enacting scripts of gender normative adventure and danger, in which food was symbolically transformed for use in nondomestic, noncomestible activities, e.g., a piece of bread becomes a camera. Boys also style-shifted linguistically, but usually in non-family roles. This study contributes to research on preschooler’s gendered social language and spontaneous symbolic play, and to research concerned with the meanings children ascribe to food and eating.
This paper investigates the socialization into healthy food practices in a Danish multi-ethnic kindergarten classroom within the frameworks of Linguistic Ethnography (Creese, 2008; Rampton, Maybin & Tusting, 2007) and Language Socialization (Ochs, 1988; Schieffelin, 1990). I present micro-analyses of three situations where the health value of milk, water, and juice is topicalized. Health is a moral concept which is culturally embedded but linguistically constructed and negotiated. I discuss how learning outcomes in health educational activities depend on individuals’ understandings prior to interactions and on the process of co-ordinating understandings. Also, in children’s conversations nutritional value becomes an interactional resource. The paper contributes to prior research with a micro-analytic perspective on the role of health education in wider processes of social exclusion and intercultural (mis)understandings.