Positioning the self in recipes and video recipes: An investigation from a corpus of food blogs in English

Positioning theory first emerged in the 1980s in the area of psychology studies to investigate how people occupy and negotiate their place – both physical and social – while interacting with other people (Harré and van Langenhove, 1999). Research in this area has later involved the linguistic and discursive practices that position writers and speakers in any form of communication and interaction. In fact, the way in which we construct our position determines our ‘self’ as writer or speaker; it influences how readers and listeners react. Vice versa, the way in which our interlocutors position themselves affects our own perception of ‘the other’ (Beeching, Ghezzi, and Molinelli, 2018). This reciprocal positioning eventually shapes the actual communication and the lexico-grammar of discourse in any kind of communicative context. Furthermore, positioning becomes all the more crucial in digital communication, in which boundaries and perceptions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are ‘distorted’ by the absence of a physical space that is replaced by a virtual, in a way abstract, environment. The study investigates strategies of self-positioning in a corpus of recipes and video recipes posted in a group of 32 food blogs. More specifically, the recipes and the corresponding video recipes in these food blogs are examined to investigate the ways in which the food bloggers position themselves with respect to their audience. The main theme of the volume (namely, “self- and other-reference in social role construction in different genres and social contexts”) is addressed by considering the food blogs as a virtual community, in which food bloggers establish themselves as leaders of communities in which users are members of the community itself, further reinforcing their role and the role of the leader through their recurrent access to the food blogs and their comments in both recipes (see Cesiri, 2020) and video recipes. Particular attention is paid to the way(s) in which self-positioning strategies are used to establish a rapport with the public, thus creating a peculiar communicative space especially in a genre, the culinary recipe, that is rarely used to this purpose and is generally believed to have achieved static structure and features (e.g., Cotter, 1997; Görlach, 2004; Norrick, 2011). The food blog recipes, and the corresponding video recipes, are contrasted to ascertain if they show specific elements that might further differentiate them as two sub-genres of the main ‘recipe’ genre. Results show that both food blog recipes and video recipes show traditional and innovative elements: on the one hand, the structure and features of the recipe genre are preserved; on the other hand, both the text of the food blog recipes and the development of the video recipe add elements that exploit the affordances of the online medium (blogs and online channels, respectively), such as additional material, personal information, advice, etcetera. These can be seen as elements characterizing and even defining a new sub-genre, that of the ‘digital’ recipe both static (food blog recipes) and dynamic (video recipes).