Chinese Cuisine Names

Introduction From collecting the cuisine names to finishing the group project, plenty of interesting findings related to this course were found from the data. For instance, the pattern of formation of Chinese cuisine name, study of concept designated by some special cuisine names, common elements among Chinese cuisine names, and monosemous and polysemous terms. To be concise and precise, this report will focus on analysing the relationship of concept and terms, which leads to a discussion of handling term segmentation.

Methodology Among September and October, six Chinese restaurants, which included Chiu Chow Garden (潮江春), Shang Hai PoPo336 (上海婆婆336), Food Yunnan (滇味), Putien (莆田), Xia Mian Guan (夏麵館) and Red Seasons (季季紅), were visited. The Chinese cuisine names which in total number of 303 were collected from the menus of these restaurants. The collected cuisine names cover most of general and daily Chinese dish names, in addition to several Chiu Chow, Yunnan, Shanghai and Fujian style dish names. After collecting the cuisine names in datasheet, the segmentation and analysis of structure of cuisine names was

In the lexical segmentation part in our group project,「紅豆沙」was viewed as a single concept by a groupmate, whereas「紅豆沙」was segmented into「紅豆」 and「沙」by another groupmate. Compared to the special Shanghai cuisine names discussed in the previous paragraphs, it seems that some common cuisine names, such as ‘Sweetened red bean soup’, have a relatively blurred boundary, in terms of viewing as an entire concept or not. In my point of view, both ways of segmentation are acceptable. Compare to the reasons and motivations of certain cuisine names discussed previously, neither a specific historical background and concept or an absolute mono-referential nature the ‘Sweetened read bean soup’ has. There is not a fixed argument that「紅豆沙」should be viewed as a concept or segmented into