Communicating Food to Children: Linguistic and Socio-Cultural Perspectives

by Daniela Cesiri

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040404447
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	10/02/2025
Series:	Routledge Research in Language and Communication
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216

About the Author

Daniela Cesiri holds a PhD in English Language and Linguistics. She is currently 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 focus on 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 has also published a monograph in 2012 entitled Nineteenth-Century Irish English: A Corpus-Based Linguistic and Discursive Analysis published by Mellen Press (Lampeter, Wales/NY, USA). A second monograph entitled The Discourse of Food Blogs. Multidisciplinary Perspectives was published in 2020 by Routledge (London/New York), while in 2015 the textbook Variation in English across Time, Space and Discourse. An Introductory Textbook was published by Carocci (Rome).

Table of Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Introduction

0.1. General Premise

0.2. Literature Review

0.2.1. Food, culture, and media

0.2.2. Socio-cultural factors in food-related communication

0.2.3. Culinary Linguistics

0.3. This book: rationale, structure, intended audience

Reference

Part 1. Food and Children: Representations and Products

Chapter One. Food and Children. An Overview

1.1. General Introduction

1.2. Food for Children: Shaping Identities, Representations and Consumers’ Choices

1.2.1. Marketing Food to Children: selling products and shaping lifestyles

1.2.2. Food in Media for Children: opposing the trend and promoting healthy food choices

1.3. Representing Food to Children

1.3.1. Food in Children’s Literature

1.3.2. The Discourse of Food for Children in Linguistics and Communication Studies

References

Chapter Two. Dataset and Methods

2.1. Introduction

2.2. The Dataset

2.3. Organization of the Volume

2.4. Methods of Investigation

2.4.1. Critical Discourse Analysis

2.4.2. Multimodal Discourse Analysis

2.4.3. Corpus-Based Analysis

References

Part 2. Food and Children: Technical Products

Chapter Three. Case Study One: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender-Based Stereotypes in Food Blog Recipes

3.1. Introduction

3.2. Critical Discourse Analysis

3.3. The Language in the Kitchen is Gendered: State-Of-The-Art

3.4. The Case Study: Rationale and Dataset

3.4.1. The ‘About Sections’ in Food Blogs

3.5. Analysis

3.5.1. General Observations

3.5.2. The Weelicious

3.5.3. Healthy Little Foodies

3.5.4. My Kids Lick The Bowl

3.5.5. Yummy Toddler Food

3.5.6. Kids Cook Real Food

3.5.7. Happy Kids Kitchen

3.6. Discussion

3.7. Conclusions

References

Part 3. Food and Children: Commercial Products

Chapter Four. Promoting nutritional and socio-cultural values through convenience products: a diachronic, contrastive multimodal discourse analysis of Nutella®’s advertisements as a case study

4.1. Introduction

4.1.1 Convenience Products and a History of Nutella®

4.2. Multimodal Discourse Analysis

4.3. The Dataset

4.4. Analysis

4.4.1. Advertisements in Italian (1964-1969)

4.4.2. Advertisements in Italian (1970-1979)

4.4.3. Advertisements in Italian (1980-2020)

4.4.4. Advertisements in English

4.5. Discussion

4.6. Conclusions

References

Part 4. Food and Children: Institutional Products

Chapter Five. Institutional Communication to Families with Children: Communicating International Guidelines through Digital Booklets and Webpages

5.1. Introduction

5.1.1. The World Health Organization (WHO)

5.1.2. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

5.1.3. The World Food Programme (WFP)

5.2. Dataset and Method of Investigation

5.2.1. Reference Corpus: Uses and Information

5.3. Quantitative Analysis

5.4. Qualitative Analysis

5.4.1. Key keywords in the WHO Sub-Corpus

5.4.2. Concordance Analysis – WHO Sub-Corpus

5.4.3. Key keywords in the FAO Corpus

5.4.4. Concordance Analysis – the FAO Corpus

5.4.5. Key keywords in the WFP Corpus

5.4.6. Concordance Analysis – the WFP Corpus

5.5. Concordance Analysis of Child/Children in the Orgs Corpus

5.6. Discussion

5.7. Conclusions

References

Conclusions

Index