LINGUIST 62N: The Language of Food

LINGUIST 62N
The Language of Food
Autumn 2008

COURSE INFORMATION

Instructor and Course

Dan Jurafsky, jurafsky@stanford.edu
Office: Margaret Jacks Hall (bld 460) 117
Office Hours: TBD

Class Time: TuTh 3:15-4:30
Class Location: 126 Margaret Jacks Hall

Textbook

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press.
John McWhorter. 2001. The Power of Babel. HarperCollins.
Papers from the web.
Papers in the course reader. The papers are also on course reserve at Green Library.

Description
Stanford Introductory Seminar. Preference to freshmen. The relationship between food and language around the globe. The vocabulary of food and prepared dishes, and crosslinguistic similarities and differences, historical origins, forms and meanings, and relationship to cultural and social variables. Social and cognitive issues in food advertising and in the language of menus and their historical development and crosslinguistic differences. The cognitive science of taste and food language. The structure of cuisines viewed as meta-languages with their own vocabularies and grammatical structure.

Required Work

Blog: You will need to set up a blog at http://www.blogger.com. Everyone will be posting their weekly homeworks and their final papers to their blogs, so if you already have a blog, set up a separate one for the course.
Discussion: This is a seminar and so the most important component is to be in class with something to say!
Homeworks: The homework for this class is to post blog entries. Entries must be posted at least weekly, but more often is of course better! Your entries can be inspired by your thoughts on the readings, or could be a study you did on something you found outside of class, perhaps with some data and analysis. In some cases I'll actually give you some topics I'd like you to consider in your blog entries. I expect you to comment at least occasionally on each others homeworks!

Readings: To be read before the class period in which they will be discussed.
Final Project: A final paper which can be a research project (on any language-and-food topic), a survey, a proposal for an experiment, and so on. I will suggest some sample project ideas as the course progresses.
Determination of final grade:

33%: final project
33%: your blog entries (and your comments on others blogs)
33%: discussions and class participation

Everyone's blogs Here is a page pointing to all the blogs.

SCHEDULE

Wk

Date

Lec/HW

Topic and Readings

1
Sep 23

Course Overview, Background

PART I: Food and Lexical Semantics (Word Meaning)

1
Sep 25
HW 1
Food Names and Menu Language

Anderson, E. N. 2005. Everybody Eats. New York University Press. pages 113-122 from Chapter 7, Food Classification and Communication
Zwicky, Ann, and Arnold Zwicky. 1980. America's National Dish: The Style of Restaurant Menus. American Speech 55: 83-92. Stanford library PDF here
News stories on food names, renaming, and ingredient names (you can find other examples!)

Equal and Splenda are going to court over the meaning of the phrase ``made from sugar''.,
French fries and freedom fries,
Danish,
Kiwis and Chinese Gooseberries (and here),
and dried plums/prunes
Or there is the NY Times's Frank Bruni on "enjoy"

2
Sep 30
HW 2
The Language of Recipes

Fisher, M. F. K., 1983. "The Anatomy of a Recipe". In With Bold Knife and Fork, p 13-24. Paragon.
Waxman, Nach. 2004. Recipes. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food And Drink in America, pages 247-250. Oxford University Press.
Cotter, Colleen. 1997. "Claiming a Piece of the Pie: How the Language of Recipes Defines Community". In Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, ed. by Anne L. Bower. University of Massachusetts Press. p 51-72.

2
Oct 2
slides.ppt
Background Day On Semantics: What is a Cup? And how do you know it's not a Mug?

Shaul, David L. and Louanna Furbee. 1998. Language and Culture. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. p 67-73.
Jean Aitchison. 1994. Words in the Mind, second edition. pages 51-57. Blackwell
Cliff Goddard. 1998. Semantic Analysis: A Practical Introduction. p 224-237. Oxford University Press.

3
Oct 7
HW 3
Food and Semantics: The Meaning of Cooking Words (or, What's the difference between roasting and baking?)

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1965/1966. The Culinary Triangle (translation by Peter Brooks of Le Triangle culinaire), Partisan Review 33, no. 4 (Fall 1966) 586-595. This copy from Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd edition, ed. by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. Routledge, 2008pp 36-43.
Lehrer, Adrienne. 1972. Cooking Vocabularies and the Culinary Triangle of Levi-Strauss. Anthropological Linguistics. 14:155-171

PART II: Food and Cognitive Linguistics

3
Oct 9

Perception and Language: Describing Wine

Lehrer, Adrienne. 2008 manuscript. Wine and Conversation: A New Look.
Ann Noble's Aroma Wheel (this will be handed out, it's not a reading)

Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area):

Lehrer, Adrienne. 1983. Wine and Conversation, pp 3-53. Indiana University Press.
Tribur, Zoe. 2006. Q. Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Vol 6, No. 2, pp 47-48.

4
Oct 14
HW 4
Does language influence perception of smell/taste/color?

Boroditsky, L. 2003. Linguistic Relativity. In Nadel, L. (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MacMillan Press: London, UK, pages 917-921.
Gil Morrot, Frédéric Brochet and Denis Dubourdi. 2001. The Color of Odors. Brain and Language, Volume 79, Issue 2 , 309-320.

Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area):

Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M., Wu, L., Wade, A., and Boroditsky, L. 2007. Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. PNAS published April 30, 2007, 10.1073/pnas.0701644104

4
Oct 16

Food and Metaphor: (or, Why does your mom call you 'honey'?)

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago. pages 3-60.
Caitlin Hines. 1999. Rebaking the Pie: The WOMAN AS DESSERT Metaphor. In Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse, Edited by Bucholtz, M. and Liang, AC and Sutton, L.A. Oxford University Press.

Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area):

Zhou, Minglang. 2000. Metalinguistic awareness in linguistic relativity: Cultural and subcultural practices across Chinese dialect communities. In Explorations in Linguistic Relativity, Pütz, Martin and Marjolijn H. Verspoor (eds.), pp 345-363.
Werning, M., Fleischhauer, J. and Beseoglu, H.. 2006. The Cognitive Accessibility of Synaesthetic Metaphors. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 2365--2370.

5
Oct 21

HW 5
Sound Symbolism and Food Advertising

Yorkston, Eric and Geeta Menon. 2004. A Sound Idea: Phonetic Effects of Brand Names on Consumer Judgements. Journal of Consumer Research, 31:43-51.

PART III: Food and Sociolinguistics

5
Oct 23

Food and Cultural Capital

Johnston and Baumann. 2007. Democracy versus Distinction: A study of omnivorousness in gourmet food writing. American Journal of Sociology 113:165-204.

Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area):

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Translated by Richard Nice in 1984). Chapter 3: The Habitus and the Space of Life-Styles. pp 176-199. Harvard University Press.

6
Oct 28

1-pgraph project idea due. Here are some sample project ideas. Writing Day: Special Guest Presentation by Joyce Moser

6
Oct 30

Dialect, Variation, and Food Vocabulary

Labov, William. 1972. The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores in Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press) pp 43-54. (Also in Coupland and Jaworski 1997)
Pop versus Soda: http://popvssoda.com:2998/countystats/total-county.html
Page from The Atlas of North American English on Cabonated beverage isoglosses.

PART IV: Food and Phonetics

7
Nov 4
Outline of final project due Drunken Speech, the Exxon Valdez case, and Phonetics

Hollien, H., DeJong, G., Martin, C. A., Schwartz, R. and Liljegren, K. Effects of ethanol intoxication on speech suprasegmentals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 110, 3198 - 3206. Brief note in Nature here: http://www.nature.com/news/2001/011220/full/news011220-10.html

Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area):

Johnson, K., Pisoni, D. and Bernacki, R. 1990. Do voice recordings reveal whether a person is intoxicated?: A case study. Phonetica. 47: 215-237.

PART V: Food and Anthropological Linguistics

7
Nov 6

The Grammar of Cuisine (or, Why do we eat dessert at the end?)

Note: this looks like a lot of reading, but don't panic, they are all very short
Claude Levi-Strauss. 1963. Structural Anthropology. page 86-87.
Rozin, Elisabeth and Paul Rozin. 2005. Culinary Themes and Variations. p 34-41. originally in Natural History, Feb 1981, p 6-14. Taken from The Taste Culture Reader, edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Berg.
Rozin, Elisabeth 2005. Flavor Principes: Some Applications p 42-48. The Taste Culture Reader, edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Berg.
Roland Barthes. 1961. Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption. Originally published as "Vers une psycho-sociologie de l'alimentation moderne" in Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations 5 September-October, pp. 977-986. This copy from Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd edition, ed. by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. Routledge, 2008, pp 28-35.
Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area):

Douglas, Mary, and Michael Nicod. 1974. Taking the Biscuit: the structure of British meals. New Society 30:744-747.

PART VI: Food and Historical Linguistics

8
Nov 11

Word History: Etymologies of food words

John McWhorter. 2001. The Power of Babel. Chapter 1: The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones, pp 15-52. HarperCollins.
Kenneth F Kiple. 2007. A movable Feast: Ten Millenia of Food Globalization pages 135-149. Cambridge University Press.
Selected articles on etymologies of food words from the online OED

8
Nov 13

No Class Today

9
Nov 18
Spillover/TBD

9
Nov 20
Linguistic cues to Food Prehistory

Calvert Watkins. 2000. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000. Online here . See also the family tree for Indo-European here, the appendix of Indo-European roots here and here.
John Huehnergard. 2000. Proto-Semitic Language and Culture. In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000. Online here . Chart of Semitic family tree here.

PART VII: Final Project Presentations

10
Dec 2

Presentations 1

10
Dec 4

Presentations 2

F
Dec 8

Monday: Final paper due at 12 noon

COURSE INFORMATION
Instructor and Course	Dan Jurafsky, jurafsky@stanford.edu Office: Margaret Jacks Hall (bld 460) 117 Office Hours: TBD Class Time: TuTh 3:15-4:30 Class Location: 126 Margaret Jacks Hall
Textbook	George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. The University of Chicago Press. John McWhorter. 2001. The Power of Babel. HarperCollins. Papers from the web. Papers in the course reader. The papers are also on course reserve at Green Library.
Description	Stanford Introductory Seminar. Preference to freshmen. The relationship between food and language around the globe. The vocabulary of food and prepared dishes, and crosslinguistic similarities and differences, historical origins, forms and meanings, and relationship to cultural and social variables. Social and cognitive issues in food advertising and in the language of menus and their historical development and crosslinguistic differences. The cognitive science of taste and food language. The structure of cuisines viewed as meta-languages with their own vocabularies and grammatical structure.
Required Work	Blog: You will need to set up a blog at http://www.blogger.com. Everyone will be posting their weekly homeworks and their final papers to their blogs, so if you already have a blog, set up a separate one for the course. Discussion: This is a seminar and so the most important component is to be in class with something to say! Homeworks: The homework for this class is to post blog entries. Entries must be posted at least weekly, but more often is of course better! Your entries can be inspired by your thoughts on the readings, or could be a study you did on something you found outside of class, perhaps with some data and analysis. In some cases I'll actually give you some topics I'd like you to consider in your blog entries. I expect you to comment at least occasionally on each others homeworks! Readings: To be read before the class period in which they will be discussed. Final Project: A final paper which can be a research project (on any language-and-food topic), a survey, a proposal for an experiment, and so on. I will suggest some sample project ideas as the course progresses. Determination of final grade: 33%: final project 33%: your blog entries (and your comments on others blogs) 33%: discussions and class participation
Everyone's blogs	Here is a page pointing to all the blogs.

	SCHEDULE
Wk	Date	Lec/HW	Topic and Readings
1	Sep 23		Course Overview, Background
PART I: Food and Lexical Semantics (Word Meaning)
1	Sep 25	HW 1	Food Names and Menu Language Anderson, E. N. 2005. Everybody Eats. New York University Press. pages 113-122 from Chapter 7, Food Classification and Communication Zwicky, Ann, and Arnold Zwicky. 1980. America's National Dish: The Style of Restaurant Menus. American Speech 55: 83-92. Stanford library PDF here News stories on food names, renaming, and ingredient names (you can find other examples!) Equal and Splenda are going to court over the meaning of the phrase ``made from sugar''., French fries and freedom fries, Danish, Kiwis and Chinese Gooseberries (and here), and dried plums/prunes Or there is the NY Times's Frank Bruni on "enjoy"
2	Sep 30	HW 2	The Language of Recipes Fisher, M. F. K., 1983. "The Anatomy of a Recipe". In With Bold Knife and Fork, p 13-24. Paragon. Waxman, Nach. 2004. Recipes. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food And Drink in America, pages 247-250. Oxford University Press. Cotter, Colleen. 1997. "Claiming a Piece of the Pie: How the Language of Recipes Defines Community". In Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories, ed. by Anne L. Bower. University of Massachusetts Press. p 51-72.
2	Oct 2	slides.ppt	Background Day On Semantics: What is a Cup? And how do you know it's not a Mug? Shaul, David L. and Louanna Furbee. 1998. Language and Culture. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. p 67-73. Jean Aitchison. 1994. Words in the Mind, second edition. pages 51-57. Blackwell Cliff Goddard. 1998. Semantic Analysis: A Practical Introduction. p 224-237. Oxford University Press.
3	Oct 7	HW 3	Food and Semantics: The Meaning of Cooking Words (or, What's the difference between roasting and baking?) Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1965/1966. The Culinary Triangle (translation by Peter Brooks of Le Triangle culinaire), Partisan Review 33, no. 4 (Fall 1966) 586-595. This copy from Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd edition, ed. by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. Routledge, 2008pp 36-43. Lehrer, Adrienne. 1972. Cooking Vocabularies and the Culinary Triangle of Levi-Strauss. Anthropological Linguistics. 14:155-171
PART II: Food and Cognitive Linguistics
3	Oct 9		Perception and Language: Describing Wine Lehrer, Adrienne. 2008 manuscript. Wine and Conversation: A New Look. Ann Noble's Aroma Wheel (this will be handed out, it's not a reading) Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area): Lehrer, Adrienne. 1983. Wine and Conversation, pp 3-53. Indiana University Press. Tribur, Zoe. 2006. Q. Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. Vol 6, No. 2, pp 47-48.
4	Oct 14	HW 4	Does language influence perception of smell/taste/color? Boroditsky, L. 2003. Linguistic Relativity. In Nadel, L. (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. MacMillan Press: London, UK, pages 917-921. Gil Morrot, Frédéric Brochet and Denis Dubourdi. 2001. The Color of Odors. Brain and Language, Volume 79, Issue 2 , 309-320. Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area): Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M., Wu, L., Wade, A., and Boroditsky, L. 2007. Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. PNAS published April 30, 2007, 10.1073/pnas.0701644104
4	Oct 16		Food and Metaphor: (or, Why does your mom call you 'honey'?) Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago. pages 3-60. Caitlin Hines. 1999. Rebaking the Pie: The WOMAN AS DESSERT Metaphor. In Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse, Edited by Bucholtz, M. and Liang, AC and Sutton, L.A. Oxford University Press. Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area): Zhou, Minglang. 2000. Metalinguistic awareness in linguistic relativity: Cultural and subcultural practices across Chinese dialect communities. In Explorations in Linguistic Relativity, Pütz, Martin and Marjolijn H. Verspoor (eds.), pp 345-363. Werning, M., Fleischhauer, J. and Beseoglu, H.. 2006. The Cognitive Accessibility of Synaesthetic Metaphors. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. 2365--2370.
5	Oct 21	HW 5	Sound Symbolism and Food Advertising Yorkston, Eric and Geeta Menon. 2004. A Sound Idea: Phonetic Effects of Brand Names on Consumer Judgements. Journal of Consumer Research, 31:43-51.
PART III: Food and Sociolinguistics
5	Oct 23		Food and Cultural Capital Johnston and Baumann. 2007. Democracy versus Distinction: A study of omnivorousness in gourmet food writing. American Journal of Sociology 113:165-204. Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area): Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Translated by Richard Nice in 1984). Chapter 3: The Habitus and the Space of Life-Styles. pp 176-199. Harvard University Press.
6	Oct 28	1-pgraph project idea due. Here are some sample project ideas.	Writing Day: Special Guest Presentation by Joyce Moser
6	Oct 30		Dialect, Variation, and Food Vocabulary Labov, William. 1972. The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores in Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press) pp 43-54. (Also in Coupland and Jaworski 1997) Pop versus Soda: http://popvssoda.com:2998/countystats/total-county.html Page from The Atlas of North American English on Cabonated beverage isoglosses.
PART IV: Food and Phonetics
7	Nov 4	Outline of final project due	Drunken Speech, the Exxon Valdez case, and Phonetics Hollien, H., DeJong, G., Martin, C. A., Schwartz, R. and Liljegren, K. Effects of ethanol intoxication on speech suprasegmentals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 110, 3198 - 3206. Brief note in Nature here: http://www.nature.com/news/2001/011220/full/news011220-10.html Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area): Johnson, K., Pisoni, D. and Bernacki, R. 1990. Do voice recordings reveal whether a person is intoxicated?: A case study. Phonetica. 47: 215-237.
PART V: Food and Anthropological Linguistics
7	Nov 6		The Grammar of Cuisine (or, Why do we eat dessert at the end?) Note: this looks like a lot of reading, but don't panic, they are all very* short* Claude Levi-Strauss. 1963. Structural Anthropology. page 86-87. Rozin, Elisabeth and Paul Rozin. 2005. Culinary Themes and Variations. p 34-41. originally in Natural History, Feb 1981, p 6-14. Taken from The Taste Culture Reader, edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Berg. Rozin, Elisabeth 2005. Flavor Principes: Some Applications p 42-48. The Taste Culture Reader, edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Oxford: Berg. Roland Barthes. 1961. Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption. Originally published as "Vers une psycho-sociologie de l'alimentation moderne" in Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations 5 September-October, pp. 977-986. This copy from Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd edition, ed. by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. Routledge, 2008, pp 28-35. Extra (advanced papers if you're thinking about a final project in this area): Douglas, Mary, and Michael Nicod. 1974. Taking the Biscuit: the structure of British meals. New Society 30:744-747.
PART VI: Food and Historical Linguistics
8	Nov 11		Word History: Etymologies of food words John McWhorter. 2001. The Power of Babel. Chapter 1: The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones, pp 15-52. HarperCollins. Kenneth F Kiple. 2007. A movable Feast: Ten Millenia of Food Globalization pages 135-149. Cambridge University Press. Selected articles on etymologies of food words from the online OED
8	Nov 13		No Class Today
9	Nov 18		Spillover/TBD
9	Nov 20		Linguistic cues to Food Prehistory Calvert Watkins. 2000. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000. Online here . See also the family tree for Indo-European here, the appendix of Indo-European roots here and here. John Huehnergard. 2000. Proto-Semitic Language and Culture. In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000. Online here . Chart of Semitic family tree here.
PART VII: Final Project Presentations
10	Dec 2		Presentations 1
10	Dec 4		Presentations 2
F	Dec 8		Monday: Final paper due at 12 noon