The Meaning of “Table Manners” in Australian English: A Lexical Semantic Study of Mealtime Behaviour

With a focus on personal conduct in social settings, mealtimes can be fraught spaces. Anglo society has developed increasingly complex behavioural rules for regulating “social eating”. Such is its importance, mealtime behaviour has endured as a prominent subject of etiquette manuals since the sixteenth century. With the primary acquisition period being childhood, many Australians can recite a set of phrases learnt at the dinner table that are then passed down to the next generation: ‘Elbows off the table’, ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full’, ‘Don’t lick your knife’, ‘Ask, don’t reach’ and ‘Chew quietly’. The listing associated with table manners is a key structural component in the semantics of this plural-only abstract noun phrase. The phrase conjures a set of table manners scripts that reflects people’s tendency to itemise its associated behaviours. The common theme of these “do’s and don’ts” is self-restraint and consideration of other people sharing the space. The goal of these teachings is to foster patience and social attentiveness, allowing people to “get along with each other”. This goal recognises the importance placed in Anglo culture on personal autonomy and its accompanying norm of not telling people what to do.

While manners more broadly have been studied by sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, this paper brings a new perspective with its applied ethnopragmatic approach to semantics through the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, and keen focus on table manners, a specialised type of manners. The data for this study has been taken from systematic Google searches of the phrase, and etiquette literature for children and adults.