The multimodal construal of the experiential domain of recipes in Japanese and Chinese

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the multimodal construal of the semantic domain of culinary operations in Japanese and Chinese. The analysis uses the semantic domain framework developed by Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) and the system of logico-semantic relations between image and text developed by Martinec and Salway (2005). The data consist of multimodal recipes for Chinese dumplings in both Japanese and Chinese with occasional reference to a comparable English recipe. We first compare the linguistic construal of the culinary semantic domain for English developed by Halliday and Matthiessen with the Japanese and Chinese texts. We then analyze the multimodal construal of this experience and the image-text relations in each of the recipes. The paper enhances previous findings on recipes in Japanese and English by Martinec (2003) and makes an important contribution to cross-cultural issues in multimodal text analyses through highlighting some of the similarities and differences in the ways that Japanese and Chinese multimodal recipes integrate visual and verbal resources in construing a comparable semantic domain. The paper concludes with a brief interpretation of the findings against the texts' socio-cultural contexts.