A semantic approach to the culinary terms of Jukun and English

Abstract

This work examines the cooking terms of the Jukun and English languages. Data for the study were obtained through both primary and secondary sources. The result of the analysis of the data indicates that at the surface level, there seems to be differences in the way the two languages perceive, view and use the various cooking terms. This is because some of the terms present in English appear to be absent in the Jukun language. However, there is a unique feature of cooking terms across the two languages because both their semantic and syntactic analyses complement each other. For instance, the terms ‘cook and bake’ are the most general verbs in the field and the freest syntactically because they exhibit an ‘ergative’ feature. Furthermore, in the two languages, the cooking verbs could feature both transitively as well as intransitively. Whenever they appear intransitively, the subject of the construction belongs to the same class of noun phrases as the object of the transitive construction. Based on the above, the study concludes that cooking terms have certain universal applications.