RECURRENT LEXIS AND PHRASEOLOGY IN ENGLISH RESTAURANT REVIEWS: A DATA-DRIVEN ANALYSIS

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus linguistic analysis of recurrent vocabulary and phraseology in written English food discourse. More specifically, it focuses on the use and discourse functions of keywords, key multi-word terms and lexical bundles in a specialized corpus comprising 200 professional restaurant reviews that were published in online editions of selected British and American newspapers. The results of the study indicate that the most distinctive lexical feature of the analyzed texts is the frequent mention of ingredients and the limited presence of stance devices. The most frequently mentioned aspects of the referential content also show that what is evaluated is the total experience of eating and dining at a restaurant. These findings contribute to the area of English for Specific Purposes, offering pedagogical potential that can be exploited when developing purpose-made teaching materials for students in food-related programs who need to learn the specialized vocabulary of their target profession.