Abstract
Abstract The syntactic and semantic analyses of 2,500 dish names retrieved from 112 restaurant, tavern, and patisserie menus in Eastern Macedonia and in Thrace in Northern Greece show that only a small number of concepts are denoted by the heads of these noun phrases (NPs): Main Ingredient (MI) of a dish, Way of preparation, Part or Cuts (for MIs with an animal as a source), and the word “portion.” Seventy percent of the dish names are headed by a noun denoting the MI or the Way of preparation in which case the MI is introduced by a modifier of the head. Syntactically, these are mostly normal Modern Greek NPs, although NPs consisting of adjacent nouns offer fertile grounds for discussing aspects of compound formation in this language. This study has instructed the structuring of a knowledge base aimed to support applications in gastronomic tourism (menu translation, provision of gastronomic, dietary, and cultural information about the foods).
Highlights
The vivid international ongoing research and the rich-related bibliography highlight the relation of food with language studies, culture, history, human psychology, medicine and hygiene, and, economy (Cotter 1997; Jurafsky 2014)
Most of the noun + noun constructs discussed here cannot be paraphrased with either of these prepositions. We argue that they stand in a relation that is discussed for the first time here, as far as we can ascertain, namely, “Main Ingredient (MI) X is cooked in Way of preparation Y.”
The prepositional phrases (PPs) or the bare noun phrases (NPs) can be provided as an answer to the question “how.” We propose that the drop of the preposition signals that the name of the ingredient is on its way to denote or already denotes a “way of preparation.”
Summary
The vivid international ongoing research and the rich-related bibliography highlight the relation of food with language studies, culture, history, human psychology, medicine and hygiene, and, economy (Cotter 1997; Jurafsky 2014). The semantic and syntactic ingredients of Greek dish names 117 conventionalized language at the lexico-grammar and phraseology level. This analysis reveals the concepts used in dish names as well as certain interesting syntactic structures featuring in menus. The application provides a translation of Greek menus into English and Russian and allows for the retrieval of dietary and cultural information about the various dishes and their ingredients.
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