To the people, food is foremost: Cultural conceptualizations of Cantonese food-related idioms

Food and food-related activities are crucial to human survival and often encode special cultural meanings that vary from one community to another. The significance of food and foodways in a speech community is often reflected in the abundance of food-related expressions in the community language. To the Cantonese people, food and eating are culturally significant, which results in a rich collection of food-related idioms in the Cantonese language. This thesis examines Cantonese food-related idioms within the theoretical and analytical frameworks of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian, 2017). The target idioms are sourced from eight authoritative Cantonese dictionaries and reference books published within the last 25 years and selected based on the result of an online survey participated by over 1000 native Cantonese speakers from Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau. The study first identifies the underlying cultural conceptualizations through examining the semantic meanings and pragmatic functions of the target idioms, and then discusses the extent of figurativeness of the target idioms from an emic perspective through investigating Cantonese speakers’ conceptual consciousness of the identified cultural conceptualizations. Subsequently, the study explores the ideological underpinnings of the cultural conceptualizations and presents the dynamics of the Cantonese cultural cognition through examining the reconceptualization of some idioms brought by ideological (re)negotiations in contemporary China. The findings show that cultural conceptualizations established from the source domains MAI (米, rice) and SIK (食, food consumption) are closely related to the fundamental aspects of the Cantonese life. They are derived from the embodied and lived experience of the Cantonese people. These cultural conceptualizations are to different extents, harnessed by the Cantonese worldview. As such, Cantonese speakers have different degrees of consciousness of the conceptual mappings underlying distinctive idioms, and accordingly acknowledge different extent of figurativeness in these idioms. The study also finds that underpinning the identified cultural conceptualizations are ideologies that evolve from shared history and constantly renegotiate along the sociological development of the Cantonese societies. Furthermore, cultural reconceptualization triggered by the ideological renegotiations can affect the vitality of the Cantonese food-related idioms, and Cantonese speakers play a crucial role in this process. The current study expands the analytical framework of Cultural Linguistics and supplement the current research on reconceptualization. It sheds light on a better understanding of the culturally structured lexicon in the Cantonese speech communities. It also has implications for the research on World Englishes, intercultural communication and translanguaging practice.