Susanne Mühleisen

Sofia Rüdiger

All humans eat and all humans speak – activities which in social life often, but not always, co-occur: We talk while eating and drinking with others, but food is also a prominent literal and metaphorical discursive topic which contributes to establishing communities and identities. This omnipresence of eating and drinking in our daily lives has led to a public fascination with foodways. The contributions in this edited collection investigate the connection between language and food from a variety of perspectives. As food discourses operate on local, global, and mediated levels, they are intertwined with notions of identity and culture and thus shed light on intimate understandings of ourselves as human beings. Talking about Food – The Social and the Global in Eating Communities provides up-to-date and thought-provoking contributions to the linguistics of food. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in food-related subjects.

The social and the global in eating communities

Talking about Food

This interdisciplinary volume critically investigates the value and topicality of the concept of community in postcolonial language situations as well as in postcolonial texts and media. Both in actual and in imagined communities, membership is constructed on an assumption of shared features - be it common values, linguistic codes, geographical origin, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, religion, professional group or joint interests and practices. But how is membership in such communities achieved, manifested, tested or contested? What new forms of community have developed in the wake of globalisation, translocation and digital media communication? Eighteen contributions by scholars in linguistics, literary and cultural studies explore the role of communication, narratives, memory and trauma in processes of belonging or unbelonging in postcolonial contexts.

Communication, Narration, Imagination

Contested Communities

Postulated word-formation rules often exclude formations that can nevertheless be found in actual usage. This book presents an in-depth investigation of a highly heterogeneous word-formation pattern in English: the formation of nouns by suffixation with -ee. Rather than relying on a single semantic or syntactic framework for analysis, the study combines diachronic, cognitive and language-contact perspectives in order to explain the diversity in the formation and establishment of -ee words. It also seeks to challenge previous measurements of productivity and proposes a new way to investigate the relationship between actual and possible words. By making use of the largest and most up-to-date electronic corpus – the World Wide Web – as a data source, this research adds substantially to the number of attested -ee words. It furthermore analyses this word-formation pattern in different varieties of English (British vs. American English; Australian English). Due to the multiplicity of approaches and analyses it offers, the study is suitable for courses in English word-formation, lexicology, corpus linguistics and historical linguistics.

Susanne Mühleisen

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