An investigation into linguistic features of typical speech acts of cooking instructions in english and vietnamese

Abstract

This study makes an investigation into the typical speech acts of cooking instructions in English and Vietnamese in an attempt to discover some typical linguistic features and then find out the similarities and differences between English cooking instructions and Vietnamese ones in terms of their pragmatics, semantics and syntax. In addition, the findings of this study were presented based on a survey of 20 cooking instructions in English and another 20 ones in Vietnamese which are taken from cooking videos on the Internet and television. The study found out three pragmatic features in cooking instructions in both languages: suggestion, description and recommendation. In term of semantic features, this study showed some meaning fields of words such as ingredients, quantity of ingredients, tools, and activites in cooking instructions. In aspect of syntactic features, the types of sentences, sentence structures, phrases and adverbial clauses were analyzed.