Thirteenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

This sociolinguistic research takes an ethnomethodological approach to account for the talk of food and food references that display organically in Spanish social conversations. The investigation describes the results of how food emerges in Spanish conversation organizationally, functionally, and thematically through a discourse analysis of two Spanish language linguistic corpus data bases and transcribed, segments of natural, scripted (native Spanish speaker to native Spanish speaker) conversational interactions between actors from two seasons of a popular Spanish television series. The corpus linguistic data bases analyzed were: 1) the Corpus Oral de Referencia de la Lengua Española Contemporánea (CORLEC), a general corpus containing transcripts of ethnographically recorded conversations in a number of social settings in Spain, and 2) the CallFriend Spanish Corpus, a general corpus that contains 60 unscripted, person to person telephone conversations of up to 30 minutes per conversation between 120 participant native speakers of different varieties of Latin American Spanish. The data analysis reveals a myriad of ways in which the topic of food emerges thematically within the structure of the Spanish conversational turn-taking system in social encounters and demonstrate significant talk oriented toward food related to health, medicine, weight, and body image. The results of this study suggest that understanding what people are saying about food while engaged in casual conversation may be a powerful source of knowledge that serves to inform public policy decisions regarding the connection between food and health.