This paper investigates how Japanese participants negotiate food assessments with their language and bodies at a Dairy Taster Brunch. The analysis focuses on 1) What triggers talk about whipped cream? 2) How do participants create, monitor, and accept/resist stances toward whipped cream, and 3) How do results shed light on the question of "Whose taste matters?".
In this presentation I analyze how Japanese participants negotiate food assessments with their language and bodies at a Dairy Taster Brunch. The data come from a corpus of video and audio recorded conversations of 9 Japanese triads eating and commenting on a 7-course Dairy Taster Brunch. I focus on a conversation where 3 women under 30 co-construct their attitudes towards whipped cream. The analysis focuses on 1) What triggers the talk about whipped cream? 2) How do participants create, monitor, and accept/resist stances toward whipped cream, and 3) How do results shed light on the question of "Whose taste matters?".
Previous research relevant to this study includes Wiggins' (2009) study of blame in the interaction at weight management meetings, Pomerantz' (1984) research on agreeing and disagreeing with assessments, and Goodwin and Goodwin (1987) and Goodwin's (2018) analysis of concurrent operations and projection in the interactive organization of assessments. I demonstrate how two of the participants (a and c) align together in giving positive assessments of whipped cream. When the third participant (b) indicates that she does not understand what they are talking about using the assertive particle yo, both a and c upgrade their assessments and elaborate on how they scrape the whip cream leftover on the plastic film around cakes using the final particles yo ne to request agreement. They also accompany their utterances with eating gestures, and scraping gestures, and use deictic gestures pointing at each other to demonstrate their agreement (Szatrowski 2006).
This research shows that participants co-construct assessments through multi-modal stances using linguistic devices (including final particles, evidential/epistemic forms, onomatopoeia, loanwords, self-repetition, agreement back channel and laughter) as well as iconic and deictic gestures. Results contribute to the growing body of research on the linguistics of food, and our knowledge of how eating norms are socially constructed over food.
