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On extralinguistic motivation behind food-specific metaphorical transfers in the history of English

Paper · 2026 · Aleksandra Kowalczyk

Summary

Kowalczyk asks why English food words so often gain secondary meanings about people, including their looks, character, body parts and sexuality. She argues that the driving force is mostly outside language, in the perceivable properties of the foods themselves. The study takes a panchronic view, joining historical and present-day evidence. It applies Kleparski's (1997) model of conceptual domains, which combines Conceptual Metaphor Theory with Langacker's notion of domains. In this model, a foodstuff carries attribute values along dimensions such as [taste], [colour], [shape], [consistency] or [smell], and these values are mapped onto the human target. The material comes from historical and slang dictionaries (OED, GDS, HDAS, Partridge and others), with dated citations from the 14th century to 2023. The analysis concludes that foodsemic shifts follow recurring patterns rather than chance. Lasting extensions tend to come from ordinary everyday foods rather than delicacies, and well-established secondary senses tend to give rise to further related ones. This matters for explaining semantic change and for modelling figurative meaning.

Key points

  • The term foodsemy comes from Kleparski (2008). It names metaphorical transfer from the category foodstuffs to the macrocategory human being, alongside zoosemy and plantosemy.
  • The author estimates at least about 200 documented foodsemic cases arising between 1300 and 1950. The earliest are Middle English nut, bacon, shrimp, cod and eggs, and nut in the sense of a worthless thing is the oldest attested.
  • To decide what counts as a food word, the author used Glazier's Random House Word Menu, which lists 1388 food items. Checked against the dictionaries, about 30% of these items had developed metaphorical or metonymic extensions.
  • The paper analyses several examples by the attributes that drive them:
    • mozzarella as a weak, limp person, driven by [consistency];
    • oyster as a sexual term, driven by [smelly] plus [smooth], [spongy] and [wettish], arising in the later 16th century;
    • a recent Finnish advert calling mozzarella Moomin liha ("Moomins' meat"), driven by [colour], [shape] and [texture].
  • Words such as bun, cookie and cake form networks of senses moving between woman, body part and intercourse. The author says the exact direction of these shifts needs a larger corpus to confirm.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Describe a source concept as a bundle of perceptual attribute values (colour, shape, texture, taste, smell), so that a metaphor can be explained by naming which values carried over to the target.
  • I2. Use an independent external word list to decide category membership (food versus animal or plant source) before counting semantic shifts, which avoids circular classification.
  • I3. Measure productivity as the share of a closed vocabulary list that shows attested extensions (here about 30%). This gives a base rate instead of relying on cherry-picked examples.
  • I4. Treat old, well-rooted figurative senses as hubs that seed newer related senses, forming a directed network of meanings.
  • I5. Back each claimed sense with dated citations from several dictionaries, showing when a meaning appeared and whether it survived.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Food entries in the ontology could store such attribute values. A figurative use like "she's a mozzarella" would then resolve to an explicit, traceable property transfer rather than an opaque sense label.
  • I2 (learn): When building silver data for figurative senses, fix the source-category inventory from an outside resource first. This keeps evaluation sets from being shaped by the parser's own guesses.
  • I3 (learn): A similar base rate could serve as a negative-control baseline when checking whether a metaphor detector over- or under-fires on a word class.
  • I4 (world): Linking WordNet senses with directed "extended-from" edges could help choose among a word's figurative readings by preferring senses close to an established hub.
  • I5 (frames): Slang and figurative frames could carry period and register tags, so that irony or implicature readings are dropped for texts where that sense was not yet in use or had already died out.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of SiedlceSiedlce · Poland2 works · 5 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksIdioms & multiword expressions · 217 works

Cite

Cite as Aleksandra Kowalczyk. 2026. On extralinguistic motivation behind food-specific metaphorical transfers in the history of English. Forum Lingwistyczne 14.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.31261/fl.2026.14.1.05

@inproceedings{kowalczyk2026extralinguistic,
  title = {{On extralinguistic motivation behind food-specific metaphorical transfers in the history of English}},
  author = {Aleksandra Kowalczyk},
  booktitle = {Forum Lingwistyczne 14},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.31261/fl.2026.14.1.05},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.31261/fl.2026.14.1.05}
}

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