Böcker av Natsuko Tsujimura

Food, Language, and Society: Communication in Japanese Foodways examines the language of food in Japanese through the lens of cognitive science and cultural studies to explore intriguing ways in which language, food, and culture interact in the fabric of Japanese society. The questions of how, where, and by whom food and food experiences are described provide abundant opportunities for investigating relationships between language and culture from multi-disciplinary perspectives. Linguistic analysis of the language of food enables us to understand cognitive information that motivates and influences people's rhetorical choices on foodways. Detailed discussions reveal that loanwords, mimetics, cooking terms, and metaphors serve as lynchpins to enrich the expressive power of the language of food. Food discourse situated in broader social and cultural contexts also reflect social norms and cultural practices deeply embedded within and beyond our gustatory and culinary life. Food narratives as in cookbooks and advertisements are an informative means for virtual interpersonal communication where individual and group identity is indexed, providing a platform for reexamination of gender and other social norms as response to changes in society. Examined from the interaction of linguistic and sociocultural perspectives, Food, Language, and Society illuminates the form, use, and social meaning of the language of food.

In Expressing Silence: Where Language and Culture Meet in Japanese, Natsuko Tsujimura discusses how silence is conceptualized and linguistically represented in Japanese. Languages differ widely in the specific linguistic and rhetorical modes through which vivid depictions of silence are achieved. In Japanese, sounds in nature evoke silence, and onomatopoeia plays an important role in simulating silent scenes. These linguistic mechanisms mediate the perception of the symbiotic relationship between sound and silence, a perception deeply embedded in the Japanese cultural experience. Expressing Silence brings the tools of both linguistic and cultural analysis in examining the remarkably rich array of representations of silence in Japanese language and culture, finding that depictions of silence through language cannot be understood without exploring what sound or silence mean to the speakers.

This textbook on the structure of Japanese is written in the framework of generative linguistics. It serves both as an introduction to Japanese linguistics for those who have no prior knowledge of linguistics, and as a reference book on Japanese for linguists in general.