Pragmatic Dominants of the Regional Menu Text

Abstract

This article examines restaurant menus as one of the components of the restaurant discourse. Any menu provides a great material for studying the linguistic and cultural features of discourse participants and the specifics of the language landscape in the city. Two restaurant menus in France (of the restaurant “La Tartine” in Albi) and in Russia (of the restaurant “Chum” in Tyumen) are considered with the aim of searching pragmatic dominants in this type of text. The research is based upon contextual, structural, semantic, and functional analysis of the main menu, children’s menu, and business lunch menu, among others, using the cognitive-pragmatic and linguistic and cultural approaches. Having taken into account the linguistic properties, the authors developed the structural scheme of a modern restaurant. The authors came to the conclusion that the semantics of dish names directly depends on the historical and cultural context, the elements of which often play the role of attractors and perform a pragmatic function. The regional component, revealed both in the composition of the dish and in its name, comes as a pragmatic dominant, influencing the consumer both implicitly (“La Tartine”) and explicitly (“Chum”). Any menu text has three main functions: informative. pragmatic, and communicative. Hybridity seems to be an integral feature of the text of the regional menu due to the ongoing cultural integration, which is reflected, among other things, in the nomination of dishes. The structure of any menu is subordinated to its pragmatic function (a strict structure for the main menu, simplified for a business lunch menu). The name of the dish comes as an attractor; the ingredients of the dish could be regarded as semantic components. Therefore, they can be considered as the general pragmatic dominant for regional restaurants both in France and Russia.