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Food and terminology: Expressing sensory experience in several languages
Edited by Rita Temmerman and Danièle Dubois
[Terminology 23:1] 2017
► pp. 89–112

Babel of the senses

On the roles of metaphor and synesthesia in wine reviews

| University of Castilla-La Mancha |

Of all the varieties of sensory experience, wine appreciation seems to be one of the most rewarding yet also one of the most challenging to verbalize. This is largely due to a lack of scientific terminology capable of describing sensory impressions (in turn related to how little is known about human perception). Wine language is highly unspecific and figurative, depending on a weakly standardized community practice rather than a solid and comprehensive range of descriptors. In this paper I study figurative language and verbal creativity in a corpus of 12,000 English and Spanish wine reviews by focusing specifically on metaphor and synesthesia as the resources that best exemplify (and often manage to overcome) many of the genre’s shortcomings. In addition to the discussion of quantitative results, a case study in synesthesia is offered as illustration of the genre’s complexities, complemented by a contrastive discussion of how similar difficulties are handled in different ways in English and Spanish.

Keywords: specialized genre, sensory perception, wine tasting notes, wine reviews, descriptors, metaphor, synesthesia
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Corpus
  • 4.The challenges of wine description and evaluation
    • 4.1Wine reviews as promotional genre
    • 4.2Stylistic and terminological inconsistencies
  • 5.A synesthesia case study: Acidity
    • 5.1Babel of the senses
    • 5.2Mixing more senses
    • 5.3A contrastive note on the Spanish corpus
  • 6.Conclusions
  • A note on the corpus
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.23.1.04sua
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