Social knowledge of food: How and why people talk about foods
type: CreativeWork
description: Social knowledge about food was investigated from a social contingency perspective (Guerin, 1994, 1998, 2004), a functional linguistic approach that considers language use having functions both to establish 'facts' in order to control listeners, and to maintain social relationships with words. In Study 1, whether people shared knowledge about food or not was examined. One hundred and fourteen New Zealand and 23 Japanese participants were asked to answer free format questionnaires asking the reasons they and others eat or do not eat particular food items. Those answers were categorised into 8 categories and 30 sub-categories of the knowledge about foods by qualitative content analysis. The results of a cluster analysis of those categories showed that participants used the categories homogeneously although there were some differences between New Zealand and Japanese participants, and that the participants selectively used different types of knowledge according to food items especially when explaining why people do or do not eat some foods. In Study 2, rhetorical features about foods were investigated: (1) numerical quantification rhetoric; (2) narrative use rhetoric; and (3) enumeration rhetoric. Factual statements from a corpus of 118 New Zealand TV commercials and 249 Japanese TV commercials were coded by the categories generated in Study 1. The results showed that the categories of factual statements were selectively used on TV commercials depending on the food types, and related closely to the results of Study 1. The rhetorical strategies appeared in commercials according to the categories of factual statements. When more than one factual statement was presented in a commercial, the relations of the factual statements were usually of a conjunctive form such as quotfact A however fact Bquot or quotfact A moreover fact Bquot, or else the factual statements were presented independently rather than the one statement logically warranting the other. These results sugges…
abstract: Social knowledge about food was investigated from a social contingency perspective (Guerin, 1994, 1998, 2004), a functional linguistic approach that considers language use having functions both to establish 'facts' in order to control listeners, and to maintain social relationships with words. In Study 1, whether people shared knowledge about food or not was examined. One hundred and fourteen New Zealand and 23 Japanese participants were asked to answer free format questionnaires asking the reasons they and others eat or do not eat particular food items. Those answers were categorised into 8 categories and 30 sub-categories of the knowledge about foods by qualitative content analysis. The results of a cluster analysis of those categories showed that participants used the categories homogeneously although there were some differences between New Zealand and Japanese participants, and that the participants selectively used different types of knowledge according to food items especially when explaining why people do or do not eat some foods. In Study 2, rhetorical features about foods were investigated: (1) numerical quantification rhetoric; (2) narrative use rhetoric; and (3) enumeration rhetoric. Factual statements from a corpus of 118 New Zealand TV commercials and 249 Japanese TV commercials were coded by the categories generated in Study 1. The results showed that the categories of factual statements were selectively used on TV commercials depending on the food types, and related closely to the results of Study 1. The rhetorical strategies appeared in commercials according to the categories of factual statements. When more than one factual statement was presented in a commercial, the relations of the factual statements were usually of a conjunctive form such as quotfact A however fact Bquot or quotfact A moreover fact Bquot, or else the factual statements were presented independently rather than the one statement logically warranting the other. These results sugges…
author: Miyazaki, Yoshihiko
keywords: social contingency, social knowledge, social representation, verbal behaviour, discursive psychology, collaborative talk, food ritual
date published: 2008
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:57:30Z
provider: University Waikato
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The University of Waikato