| Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 15-34 |
| Abbreviation: APJCR |
| e-ISSN: 2733-8096 |
| Publication date: 31 December 2025 |
| Received: 25 September 2025 / Received in Revised Form: 5 December 2025 / Accepted: 23 August 2025 |
| DOI: https://doi.org/10.22925/apjcr.2025.6.2.15
|
Gastrolinguistics: Exploring Linguistic Uniqueness of Culinary Language in Modern Bengali Cuisine Corpus |
| Niladri Sekhar Dash (Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata), INDIA; Amrita Bhattacharyya (Amity University, Kolkata), INDIA |
| Copyright 2025 APJCR This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Abstract |
| The purpose of this paper is to record some unique and interesting linguistic features found in the Modern Bengali Cuisine Corpus (MBCC) and investigate how these features are represented in the cuisine texts of the corpus. The corpus is designed with curated cuisine texts obtained from various digital sources covering a small time window (2001-2024) with limited geographical variations. It contains only texts to reflect on some lexicosyntactic uniqueness of the text type. Since this is primarily a text corpus, the non-textual elements (e.g., images, graphs, sketches, videos and emojis) are removed from it to maximize textual representation and minimize linguistic inaccuracies. Subsequently, the corpus is put to some qualitative analyses to unveil some unique linguistic phenomena that are characteristically inherent to the culinary discourse. The initial analysis of the MBCC reveals the presence of cryptic syntactic structures, the prevalent use of imperative constructions, the high use of content words, frequent use of code-mixing and the strategies for targeted audience orientation. All these features, when considered together, underscore some inherent variabilities in linguistic structures dictated by communicative needs and manifest the remarkable proficiency of the human brain in extracting pertinent information from structurally complex texts. Further studies are necessary to understand the frequency of use of content words, distribution patterns of code-switching in discourse-diverse texts, linguistic strategies used in information encoding and the possibility of using this corpus in various domains of Bengali linguistics and technology developments. |
Keywords |
| Gastrolinguistics, Bengali, Culinary Discourse, Cuisine Corpus, Linguistic Variability |
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The Authors |
| Professor Niladri Sekhar Dash works in the areas of corpus linguistics, language processing, computational lexicography, indigenous language documentation & digitization, computer-assisted language teaching, and digital humanities and ethnography. He has published 24 books/monographs and more than 220 research papers. He has delivered academic talks and taught courses in more than 150 universities and institutions in India and abroad.
Dr. Amrita Bhattacharyya is an Associate Professor at Amity Institute of English Studies and Research, Amity University Kolkata. She is a bilingual poet and a writer having thirteen books published to her credit. Her areas of research interest include Culture Studies, Metaphysics, and Linguistics. She has published several research papers and book chapters in national and international peer-reviewed journals and books, e.g., Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, IEEE journal, Rupkatha Journal, JCLA, CIIL Mysuru, Sanglap, to name a few. |
The Authors’ Addresses |
| First Author Niladri Sekhar Dash Professor Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata Barrackpore Trunk Road Kolkata, INDIA Email: ns_dash@yahoo.comCorresponding Author Amrita Bhattacharyya Associate Professor Amity University, Kolkata Major Arterial Road, Action Area II, Rajarhat, New Town, Kolkata, INDIA Email: arushi.asmi13@gmail.com 
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