Taste of Wine or “Taste” of a Person: (Synesthetic) Metaphors in Wine Reviews

Taste of Wine or “Taste” of a Person: (Synesthetic) Metaphors in Wine Reviews Yin Zhong Wing Sum Tse Center for Language Education The University of Science and Technology Wong Shiu Chi Secondary School lcyinzhong@ust.hk edu121043@gmail.com Abstract Within the figurative repertoire of the genre of wine reviews, anthropomorphic metaphor is the most recurring pattern in many languages. However, few studies studied the metaphors in wine reviews in the Chinese language nor focused on the synesthetic metaphors as well as the synesthetic directionality in the wine discourse. This study built a small corpus of wine reviews and annotated conceptual metaphors, synesthetic metaphors, and synesthetic directionality in Chinese. With various metaphorical units concerning a person’s appearance and/or personality identified in our data, we confirmed the most frequent mapping of (TASTE OF) WINE IS A PERSON in Chinese wine reviews. In the meantime, VISION, which is considered a more abstract and less embodied sensory domain, however, provides the most vocabulary to describe the taste and smell of the wine. Although the finding seemingly violated the conventional mapping that more abstract concepts are comprehended via more concrete notions, we propose that the gustatory (and olfactory) sense is a “mutable” sensory domain in terms of its abstractness. Further, the evaluative similarity between the bodily experiences and the interactional communication may be the underlying cause of the reversibility of the TASTE and PERSONALITY as source domains in conceptual metaphor mappings. 1 Winespeak refers to the specific terms or jargons that wine professionals use while discussing wine. Keywords: wine reviews, metaphors, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, synesthetic metaphors, linguistic synaesthesia 1 Introduction Metaphors are ubiquitous in wine reviews, and they play a pivotal role in describing the wine tasting experience. Existing literature demonstrated that metaphor is a frequent and significant feature of the wine discourse (Caballero, 2007; Creed, 2016; Creed & McIlveen, 2018; Paradis & Eeg-Olofsson, 2013; Suárez-Toste, 2007). “Without metaphor, wine would be hard to discuss” (Caballero et al., 2019, p. 72). The prevalence of metaphor use in the genre of wine discourse may be partly because of the scarce taste and smell vocabulary in languages such as English (Levinson & Majid, 2014), although taste and smell are the primary two sensory faculties that take part in wine tasting. To facilitate depicting wine tasting experiences, conceptual metaphorical frames are applied. For example, wine as a product will be portrayed as LIVING ORGANISMS (e.g., WINES ARE PLANTS; WINES ARE ANIMALS; WINES ARE PEOPLE), THREE- DIMENSIONAL ARTIFACTS (e.g., WINES ARE BUILDINGS, WINES ARE TEXTILES), and DYNAMIC ARTIFACTS (e.g., through manner-of-motion verbs like run, ride, come across) (Caballero et al., 2019; Creed, 2016). Another critical feature in winespeak1 is that professionals and reviewers will use an array of sensory lexicons to evaluate wine attributes because tasting wine involves the activation of sensory perceptions via VISION, TASTE, SMELL, and TOUCH (or mouthfeel). VISION detects color and 2 color depth, TASTE tells sweetness and acidity, SMELL distinguishes fruit intensity and oak presence, while TOUCH (or mouthfeel) evaluates the body, tannin, and carbonation of the …

Content truncated to 500 words