Describing Sensory Experience: The Genre of Wine Reviews

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to shed light on how experiences of sensory perceptions in the domains of VISION, SMELL, TASTE and TOUCH are recast into text and discourse in the genre of wine reviews.Because of the alleged paucity of sensory vocabularies, in particular in the olfactory domain, it is of particular interest to investigate what resources language has to offer in order to describe those experiences. We show that the main resources are, on the one hand, words evoking properties that are applicable cross-modally and properties of objects that range over more than one domain, and on the other, vivid imagery that compares the characteristics of the wine with people, building, animals and the hustle and bustle of market places and other events. The second goal is to account for the construals of the meanings of the expressions used in the recontextualization into written discourse in the light of their apparent flexibility across the descriptions of the sensory experiences. In contrast to a large body of the literature on sensory meanings in language, we argue that the descriptors of properties such as sharp, soft, lemon and cherry used to describe a wine's qualities across the sensory domains are not polysemous synesthetic metaphors, but monosemous synesthetic metonymizations, more precisely zone activations. With regard to the imagery used, the construals represented cover both similes, metaphorizations and metonymizations proper.

Conceptual Spaces at Work in Sensory Cognition: Domains, Dimensions and Distances

“…It is worth noting in this context that these reviews have had an enormous impact in the wine world, not only among connoisseurs but so grateful to Mats Eeg-Olofsson who carried out the computational work and made the relevant searches. A description of the corpus can be found in Paradis & Eeg-Olofsson (2013). The database has also been the basis for the creation of an interactive visualization tool (Kerren, Kyusakova & Paradis 2013).…”

Semantic profiles of antonymic adjectives in discourse

“…In the context of Food the use of thin and thick fall into two distinct categories, one modifying consistency/or taste of liquid and the other modifying volume or width. In some cases where thin modifies consistency, it is used metonymically, e.g., in thin wine and thin beer, in which case thin does not refer to consistency as such, but to lack of smell and taste (Paradis and Eeg-Olofsson 2013). In the data set, thin and thick are also used to modify sound, mostly, but not only, the sound of voices.…”

A Genre-Based Textual Analysis of Expert Online Reviews of Electric Guitar Fuzz Pedals

“…There are multitudes of sensory descriptors that characterize the sonic qualities of the pedals and increase their WOM legend, first within this discourse community, and then to the larger world of music listeners, perhaps. Table 2 provides some examples of these -target sensory appeals.‖ Table 2, with the exception of -Hearing,‖ are to be found, according to Paradis and Eeg-Olofsson (2013), in the genre of wine reviews. Similar appeals to the sensory (Krishna, 2011) are well known in marketing and recognized as categories of audition, vision, taste, olfaction (smell), and haptics (touch).…”