Analysis of International Food Processing Lexis and Formulaic Languages: A Corpus Linguistic-Based Approach
Keywords:
Corpus linguistics, International recipes, Qualitative descriptors, Adverbial modifiersAbstract
Gastronomy plays an important cultural role and often attracts people from diverse cultural backgrounds. However, learners still face difficulties using English effectively when discussing culinary topics. Therefore, this study investigates the English words frequently used in international culinary books by compiling and analyzing a specialized corpus together with the AntConc 4.3.1 of Anthony (2024). Log Likelihood, Bayesian Information Criterion based Bayes Factor, Effect Size for Log Likelihood, and expert evaluation were together employed to identify statistically significant lexical items. The analysis revealed 1,165 English words that frequently occur in international recipe books. The cluster validation demonstrated high reliability (93.61%), indicating that the identified items consistently co-occur in the corpus. This represents the core vocabulary of the international recipe corpus. The dependent-sample t-test results indicated significant differences between these 1,165 items and those in eight reference corpora (p < .001). These findings confirm their domain-specific status. The identified 1,165 vocabulary was classified into six functional categories: 1) terms associated with international culinary procedural aspects, 2) terms linked to international culinary ingredients, 3) terms related to international culinary apparatus, 4) terms delineating the attributes of international food and culinary apparatus, 5) terms portraying the characteristics of international culinary processes, and 6) other pertinent terms related to international food recipes. Also, contextual analysis provided Thai translation of the 1,165 frequent lexical items and examined 1,192 verb-collocations. The collocation analysis shows that many vocabulary items regularly co-occur with specific procedural verbs. This study offers a lexical resource that can support language learning and communication in the international culinary domain.
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