The Transforming Power of Language in Menus: Metaphor and Metonymy in Chinese-Czech Dish Names
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In this presentation, we introduce use of multiple parallel texts (Multi-ParT henceforth; for details, see Knotková and Lu 2020; Lu et al. 2018; Lu 2019, 2020, Accepted; Lu et al. 2020) as a means of studying cultural conceptualization of food, especially in terms of the stability and variation of conceptualization in menus in different languages. In the first part of the talk, we introduce the notion of cultural conceptualization as defined by Sharifian (2011, 2017), arguing that language has a power that shapes human understanding of the world. Following from that, we will argue that Multi-ParT is methodologically meaningful in the sense that it meets the call for the social turn in Cognitive Linguistics (Geeraerts 2016), which advocates proper emphasis on variation within the same linguistic community. In the second half of the presentation, we apply Multi-ParT to the cross-linguistic study of culinary language, using dish names collected from menus of Chinese restaurants in Czechia (that are in Chinese and Czech). In this part, we show how the cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and metonymy work differently in the two languages and how the different linguistic representations give rise to culture-specific conceptualizations, to showcase the transforming power of language in naming dishes. |