Cover not available
Article published In:
Food and terminology: Expressing sensory experience in several languages
Edited by Rita Temmerman and Danièle Dubois
[Terminology 23:1] 2017
► pp. 66–88

From the glass through the nose and the mouth

Motion in the description of sensory data about wine in English and Spanish

| Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha |

Motion verbs are often used to predicate entities such as roads, paths and the like as in “The road snakes to the port of Shakespeare Bay before climbing over the last hill to Picton” or “La carretera serpentea unos 30 kilómetros entre las montañas de la cordillera Nipe”. The verbs foreground the path configuration and dynamic rendering of things that cannot move – a phenomenon known as fictive motion (Langacker 1987; Talmy 1996). However, motion verbs are also frequent components in specialized contexts such as wine discourse, where they communicate different sensory experience of wines as in “Exotic, exuding red berry aromas and flavors that sneak up on you rather than hit you over the head”, “Bright and focused, offering delicious flavors that glide smoothly through the silky finish”, or “En boca tiene una magnifica entrada, aunque en el paso sobresalen rasgos vegetales y se precipita hacia un final en el que predominan notas tostadas y amargas”. Using two corpora of tasting notes written in English and in Spanish, I examine the motion expressions used to communicate the sensory experiences of the wines and explore the motivations for their use in descriptions of wines’ aromas, flavours and mouthfeel. Three questions are at the heart of this study. They are (i) what types of scenarios are described through motion expressions, (ii) what sensory perceptions do they describe, and (iii) what may the differences between English and Spanish be?

Keywords: motion language, genre, sensory perception, wine jargon, cross-linguistic research
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Communicating about wine in tasting notes
  • 3.Methodology and data
  • 4.Motion language in TNs
    • 4.1Motion language and tasting stage
    • 4.2Motion language and sensory perception
  • 5.Final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.23.1.03cab
References
Amoraritei, Loredana
2002 “La métaphore en oenologie.” Metaphorik.de 31: 1–12. [URL]. Accessed 5 February 2004.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Leonard S.
1998 The Official Guide to Wine Snobbery. New York: Quill.Google Scholar
Caballero, Rosario
2007 “Manner-of-Motion Verbs in Wine Description.” Journal of Pragmatics 391: 2095–2114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Caballero, Rosario, and Ernesto Suárez-Toste
2008 “Translating the Senses. Teaching the Metaphors in Winespeak.” In Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology, ed. by Frank Boers and Seth Lindstromberg, 241–260. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2010 “A Genre Approach to Imagery in Winespeak.” In Researching and Applying Metaphor in the Real World, ed. by Graham Low, Zazie Todd, Alice Deignan, and Lynne Cameron, 265–287. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Caballero, Rosario, and Carita Paradis
2013 “Perceptual Landscapes from the Perspective of Cultures and Genres.” In Sensuous cognition – Explorations into human sentience – Imagination, (E)motion and Perception, ed. by Rosario Caballero and Javier Díaz-Vera, 77–105. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 “Making Sense of Sensory Perceptions across Languages and Cultures.” In Sensory Perceptions in Language and Cognition, ed. by Rosario Caballero and Carita Paradis. Special issue of Functions of Language 22 (1): 1–19.Google Scholar
Filipović, Luna
2007 Talking about Motion: A Crosslingual Investigation of Lexicalization Patterns. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gawel, Richard, and Anita Oberholster
2001 A Mouth-feel Wheel: Terminology for Communicating the Mouth-feel Characteristics of Red Wine. Adelaide: Department of Horticulture, Viticulture and Oenology, University of Adelaide.Google Scholar
Gregutt, Paul
2003 “Scents and Nonsense.” The Seattle Times Pacific Northwest Magazine. Online document. [URL]. Accessed 12 May 2006.Google Scholar
Herdenstam, Anders
2004 Sinnesupplevelsens Estetik. Vinprovaren, i Gränslandet Mellan Konsten och Vetenskapen. Stockholm: Dialoger.Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald
1987 Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. I: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lehrer, Adrienne
2009 Wine and Conversation. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levin, Beth
1993 English Verb Classes and its Alternations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Morrot, Gil, Frédéric Brochet, and Denis Dubourdieu
2001 “The Color of Odors.” Brain and Language 79 (2): 309–320. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nedlinko, Anatoli
2006 “Viticulture and Winemaking Terminology and Terminography.” Terminology 12 (1): 137–164. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Noble, Ann, Richard Arnold, John Buechsenstein, Jane Leach, Janice Schmidt, and Peter Stern
1987 “Modification of a Standardised System of Wine Aroma Terminology.” American Journal of Oenology and Viticulture 38 (2): 143–146.Google Scholar
Paradis, Carita
2009 “This Beauty should Drink well for 10–12 Years: A Note on Recommendations as Semantic Middles.” Text & Talk 29 (1): 53–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 “Touchdowns in Winespeak: Ontologies and Construals in Use and Meaning-Making.” In Proceedings for the 1st Congress on Linguistic Approaches to Food and Wine Descriptions, ed. by Margarita Goded Rambaud and Alfredo Poves Luelmo, 57–72. Madrid: UNED University Press.Google Scholar
Paradis, Carita, and Mats Eeg-Olofsson
2013 “Describing Sensory Experience. The Genre of Wine Reviews.” Metaphor and Symbol 28 (1): 22–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paradis, Carita, and Charlotte Hommerberg
2016 “We Drink with Our Eyes First: Multiple Sensory Perceptions and Mixed Imagery in Wine Reviews.” In Mixing Metaphors, ed. by Raymond Gibbs, 177–202. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael
2003 “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language & Communication 231: 193–229. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004 “ ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus.” Current Anthropology 45 (5): 621–652. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Slobin, Dan I.
1996 “Two Ways to Travel: Verbs of Motion in English and Spanish.” In Grammatical Constructions: TheirFform and Meaning, ed. by Masayoshi Shibatani and Sandra A. Thompson, 195–220. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
2004 “The Many Ways to Search for a Frog: Linguistic Typology and the Expression of Motion Events.” In Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, ed. by Sven Strömqvist and Ludo Verhoeven, 219–257. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
2006 “What Makes Manner of Motion Salient? Explorations in Linguistic Typology, Discourse, and Cognition.” In Space in languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories, ed. by Maya Hickmann and Stéphane Robert, 59–81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Suarez-Toste, Ernesto
2007 “Metaphor inside the Wine Cellar: On the Ubiquity of Personification Schemas in Winespeak.” Metaphoric.de 121: 53–64.Google Scholar
Talmy, Leonard
1985 “Lexicalization Patterns: Semantic Structure in Lexical Forms.” In Language Typology and Lexical Descriptions. Vol. 3. Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, ed. by Timothy Shopen, 36–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1988 “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition.” Cognitive Science 121: 49–100. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1991 “Paths to Realization: A Typology of Event Conflation.” In Proceedings of the Seventeenth Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, ed. by Kathleen Hubbard, 480–519. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
1996 “Fictive Motion in Language and “Ception”.” In Language and Space, ed. by Paul Bloom, Mary Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill Garrett, 211–276. Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press.Google Scholar
2000 Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 9 other publications

Abe, Sayaka
2022. Chapter 11. Applying force dynamics to analyze taste descriptions in Japanese online columns. In The Language of Food in Japanese [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 25], ► pp. 320 ff. DOI logo
Fukushima, Hiroki
2021. Defining the Verbs for “Understanding and Interpretation” of Japanese Sake. In Bridging the Gap Between AI, Cognitive Science, and Narratology With Narrative Generation [Advances in Human and Social Aspects of Technology, ], ► pp. 63 ff. DOI logo
Fukushima, Hiroki
2022. Chapter 7. Clear is sweet. In The Language of Food in Japanese [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 25], ► pp. 192 ff. DOI logo
López Arroyo, Belén & Roda P. Roberts
2020. What wine descriptors really mean A comparison between dictionary definitions and real use. Journal of Wine Research 31:4 ► pp. 301 ff. DOI logo
López Arroyo, Belén & Lucía Sanz Valdivieso
2022. The phraseology of wine and olive oil tasting notes. Terminology. International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Issues in Specialized Communication 28:1 ► pp. 37 ff. DOI logo
Tiefenbacher, John P. & Christi Townsend
2019. The Semiofoodscape of Wine: The Changing Global Landscape of Wine Culture and the Language of Making, Selling, and Drinking Wine. In Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Tiefenbacher, John P. & Christi Townsend
2020. The Semiofoodscape of Wine: The Changing Global Landscape of Wine Culture and the Language of Making, Selling, and Drinking Wine. In Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, ► pp. 4103 ff. DOI logo
Toratani, Kiyoko
2022. Introduction to the volume. In The Language of Food in Japanese [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 25], ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2019. Representing Wine – Sensory Perceptions, Communication and Cultures [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research, 21], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.