Chapter Sixteen
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from international journals of food science. With the help of frequency
lists and collocation analyses, this study aims to situate terminological
units in an experiential, domain-based (domain-specific) schema. Framing,
I argue provides a reference tool to capture the character of a specific
specialized terminology, and, I argue, to compare the specialized
languages used in different domains. A cognitively grounded approach to
terminology accounts for the domain-specific character of the lexicon by
including the contextualization of the lexemes. As such it, offers a way of
relating words to their actual use and the conceptualizations that reflect the
operationalizations in the scientific field.
The study begins by sketching the communicative setting in sensory
science. This is important so as to get an idea of the meta-function of
language in this specialized domain. Following this, the next section
begins with a discussion of the scientific text as a representation of the
conceptual information that underlies the practices in food science. I argue
that this alignment between text and scientific research objectives is found
across specialized domains. In the following, I present the material and
method of the present study. The results of the corpus-based analysis are
followed by a few remarks on the application of the findings to other
domains. Finally, the last section discusses the main findings and the
author’s reservations of the study.
Communication in sensory science
This section begins with a discussion of the main principles/characteristics
that guide communication in the field of food science. The communicative
setting is largely a product of the aims of field, namely to assess and
discuss the sensory features of products amongst experts and to enable an
exchange with consumers (i.e. lay people) via direct communication, or
via advertising/marketing. Further, this section provides a more specified
characterization of sensory scientific terminology amongst experts as this
study focuses on the specific language used by food scientists to
communicative amongst each other. This work is thus positioned at the
interface between expert communication and expert operationalizations in
food science.
As mentioned above, the communicative situation in sensory science
includes interaction between professionals from the field on the one hand,
and between experts and consumers, on the other (Diederich 2015). The
language use situation in sensory science is depicted in Figure 1.