What is cohesiveness?-A linguistic exploration of the food texture testing literature

Cohesiveness is a widely used term in the food texture literature. Authors of this literature employ divergent methodologies, and can be divided into those who assess texture through sensory evaluation and those who use instrumental techniques. Within each of these disciplines, there are some specialized uses of the word, creating discipline specific terms such as "cohesiveness of mass." The fact that many researchers attempt to (re)define cohesiveness, does suggest that the term is not universally understood. This blurring arises partly from the abstract nature of what it describes and also from ill matching measurements being used to quantify it. A widely agreed definition is that cohesiveness is "the strength of the internal bonds making up the body of the product," yet a challenge continues to be how we can measure it. Using the Sketch Engine corpus analysis interface to examine a corpus of articles from the food texture literature in the periods 2002-2017, the contexts in which the word stem "cohes*" is used were explored. Collocation analysis suggests that in addition to considerable commonality in the way that "cohesiveness" combines with other terms, differences reflect the foci of the disciplines with the instrumental community predominantly dealing with physical measurement while the sensory community relate "cohesiveness" more to oral processing and texture perception.