Linguacultural variations in the domain of FOOD

Abstract

As the domain of food is an area wherein the role of the conceptual system as a locus of contact is inevitable, it is argued here for the need for empirical study on the divergent and convergent food and language practices and how they may implicitly or explicitly reflect the sociocultural conceptualizations of the environment in which such linguacultural variations exist. To this end, this article intends to report and reflect on the qualitative textual analysis of selected technologically mediated menus in Iraq. As public culturally written texts that are replete with intersemiotic (or heterolingual) features, menus in this context overall come to implicitly index social groups’ relatively shared cultural cognition as related to the formation processes of their identities and transcultural spaces. This, in turn, textualizes the construction of a transnational discourse to resist any politicized and territorialized spaces of hegemony with respect to nation, language, culture, race and ethnicity in context.