East Meets West The Discourse of Japanese American Cookbooks as Intercultural Communication

Abstract

This study explores the discourse of cookbooks as intercultural communication through the examination of a corpus of recipes in order to describe their linguistic features and the communicative strategies employed by the authors. The analysis is of recipes from two cookbooks written by two well-known Japanese chefs for an American audience. By nature, cookbooks are a didactic text and accordingly exhibit recognizable features of a manual. That is, recipes include cooking-related lexicon, imperative verbs, and descriptive clauses. However, the recipes from the data also incorporate speech-like elements, such as first person and second person pronouns, and ambiguous and contemporary language. Findings suggest that the written features provide ways to maintain the integrity of the recipe genre while the spoken features provide ways for the authors to align themselves with their foreign readers. Thus, new insights into how writers can relate to their foreign audience through cookbooks, an everyday text yet rich with different practices of communication, can be inferred as more and more cookbooks become platforms for intercultural communication.