Chapter Sixteen
356
The texts included in the corpus are limited to articles with a mention
of texture or hedonics in the title, abstract, or as keyword in the main text.
This limitation serves the scope of the analysis, on the one hand, but also
the variety of included articles. Typically, these studies examine a
product’s set-up or consistency, thus “texture”. A food product’s texture is
manipulated during mastication – this deformation is of interest both in
studies that deal with human mastication (e.g. biting or chewing), as well
as instrumental force application. Further, the importance of a food’s
texture cannot be underestimated in the perception and quality assessment
of a product (cf. Delwiche 2004, Szczesniak 2002). The feature of
“hedonics” underlines the personal, agent-based assessment of a food
item. An analysis of consumers’ likings and dislikings is core to the
improvement of foods and thus to the marketing and selling of products. A
mention of texture and hedonics results in a combination of articles which
focus on a range of topics of interest in sensory science.
Methodology: Framing scientific language in food science
journals
The methodology employed in this study draws heavily on Faber’s work
and certain methodological procedures from the FrameNet project in
Berkeley (Fillmore and Baker 1997–). The analysis serves two main
purposes, namely 1) to characterize the general terminological character of
the texts by deriving frequency lists, and 2) to detect the conceptual
relationships between terminological units via co-occurrence/collocation
analyses. In so doing, the larger aim is to detect more general event frames
which serve as templates to underlie an understanding of the scientific
studies, and consequently scientific terminology. Further, I purpose that
such templates (with little modification) can lend themselves to an analysis
of specialized language across domains.
In their research project on the domain of coastal engineering, Faber et
al. (2005; 2009) provide an extensive analysis of the event frame that
underlies the terminological web in coastal engineering, a domain which is
characterized by a certain dynamism and thus, cannot be described
conceptually based on a taxonomical tree:
It is necessary to situate concepts in a particular setting and within the
context of dynamic processes that define and describe the principal event
in the specialized field in question (Faber et al. 2005: 2).Similarly, in the field of sensory science, which per se is dynamic as it
deals with reactions of food products at various states of manipulation, an