Communicating Food to Children (Routledge Research in Language and Communication)

This book offers a systematic account of communication on food aimed at children, investigating verbal and visual strategies used in food media in English from synchronic and diachronic perspectives.

While there is a wide body of research on food discourse, there has been little to date on children as a particular category of actors within food-related communication. Cesiri integrates work from corpus linguistics, genre analysis, and multimodality to analyze verbal and visual components in media that transmit specialist knowledge and familiarize children with foundational food concepts, the extra-linguistic factors that shape food-related communication, and the ways in which different genres represent culinary traditions to children. The volume features an extensive corpus of technical products such as cookbooks, commercial products such as advertisements, and institutional products such as leaflets from international institutions. In applying a multi-layered perspective to a diverse range of food-related communication materials, Cesiri seeks to unpack whether potential differences in communicative strategies can be attributed to the source culture of interactants or those shared by a specific community of actors, and in turn, further insights into the nature of domain-specific discourse.

This volume will appeal to scholars in discourse analysis, multimodality, corpus linguistics, and childhood studies.

Daniela Cesiri holds a PhD in English Language and Linguistics. She is currently an associate professor in English language, linguistics, and translation in the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy). Her main research interests are applied linguistics, pragmatics, the use of corpora for discourse analysis, computer-mediated communication, knowledge dissemination, metaphors in specialised discourse, and the study of ESP/EAP in different settings, domains, and genres. She has published numerous articles for national and international publishers on these topics. She also published a monograph in 2012 entitled Nineteenth-Century Irish English: A Corpus-Based Linguistic and Discursive Analysis. A second monograph entitled The Discourse of Food Blogs: Multidisciplinary Perspectives was published in 2020 by Routledge, while in 2015, the textbook Variation in English across Time, Space and Discourse: An Introductory Textbook was published.