31.1813, Review: Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics: Caballero, Suárez-Toste, Paradis (2019)
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Subject: 31.1813, Review: Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics: Caballero, Suárez-Toste, Paradis (2019)
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Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2020 21:50:46
From: Peter Backhaus [backhaup at gmail.com]
Subject: Representing Wine – Sensory Perceptions, Communication and Cultures
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-4436.html
AUTHOR: Rosario Caballero
AUTHOR: Ernesto Suárez-Toste
AUTHOR: Carita Paradis
TITLE: Representing Wine – Sensory Perceptions, Communication and Cultures
SERIES TITLE: Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 21
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2019
REVIEWER: Peter Backhaus, Waseda University
SUMMARY
“Representing Wine” by Rosario Caballero, Ernesto Suárez-Toste and Carita
Paradis deals with the various ways in which the consumption of wine and the
perceptions involved are communicated through language. As described in the
Preface, the study presented is based on the three authors’ long-time research
on the topic. Simply put, the main focus is on “how speakers manage to convey
what they want to convey about wine” (xi).
Chapter 1 introduces the term ''winespeak'' and the key notion of
''recontextualization,'' here understood as ''the transfer of knowledge from
people's experiences in and with the world into language and across various
modes of expression'' (2). It also identifies two ''pillars'' to be taken into
consideration when discussing the language of wine: the macro-level of genre
and an overall ''culture of wine,'' complemented by the micro-level of
linguistic utterances and constructions.
Chapter 2 presents the methods and theories that guide the analysis: cognitive
linguistics, particularly the Lexical Meaning as Ontologies and Construals
framework as developed by one of the authors (Paradis 2005), and discourse
analysis, specifically the subfield of genre analysis. The chapter also
introduces the databases, which include both textual corpora (most notably,
tasting notes) and multimodal material (wine labels, advertisements, film
documentaries) in two languages, English and Spanish.
Chapter 3 paves the way for the subsequent chapters by sketching the sensory
experiences during the tasting event and how they become transformed into
language. In order to do so, two well-known analytical schemas are discussed
that offer differing approaches for putting wine into words: the German Aroma
Wheel and the Wine and Spirit Education Trust system. The second part of the
chapter introduces the genre of the tasting note, which is the most important
text type to be dealt with.
Chapter 4, titled ''Descriptors of wine across the senses,'' starts with an
impressive list of the many words for wine used in the tasting notes corpus,
from ''brew'' and ''baby'' to ''triumph'' and ''work of art.'' The main aim of
the chapter is to introduce the key concepts for describing the different
sensory perceptions during the tasting event, most notably metonymy and
synesthesia.
Chapter 5 follows up on this by examining the important work done by
metaphors. An overall distinction is made between process-focused metaphors
(e.g. wines as part-whole entities) and product-focused metaphors (e.g. wines
as living organisms with “nose,” “body,” etc.). The analysis also identifies a
few inconsistencies with common metaphor theory. Most strikingly, metaphors in
wine language do not necessarily involve a mapping of concrete onto abstract
notions but often seem to be doing just the opposite, given that wine language
habitually attempts to capture concrete experiences such as smell and taste by
likening them to more abstract concepts. A second linguistic characteristic of
tasting notes is motion language, particularly verbs that help “reconstruct
and recontextualize the tasting event” and “describe the sensory experiences
afforded by wine” (92).
The topic of Chapter 6 is the description of the presence of certain
substances in wine, including interrelated notions such as quantity,
range/scope, salience, and a number of others. Here, too, the important
function of sensory, metaphorical, and metonymical language is explored, as is
the role of motion verbs. The authors also show that statistical data, such as
exact percentages of certain ingredients or substances, are considered largely
irrelevant and therefore ''conspicuously absent in most T[asting] N[ote]s''
(101).
Chapter 7 uses a larger subcorpus of reviews by world-famous wine critic
Robert Parker to examine the rhetorical strategies used to achieve credibility
in wine assessment. It identifies the main components in Parker’s writing and
their overall structure, thereby applying many of the findings from the
previous chapters.
Chapter 8 moves away from the textual analysis of tasting notes to explore the
marketing of wine as observable in wine names and packaging. With respect to
the former, a distinction is made between literal naming strategies, most
commonly toponyms, and metaphorical naming strategies that appeal to some
specific quality of the wine. A most basic issue in packaging is wine bottle
design, where the “male” Bourdeaux type is juxtaposed with the “female”
Burgundy type. Also of interest is labeling, including the rule of thumb that
high quality wine normally comes with a very simple design. This equation,
however, is easily manipulated for promoting cheaper wines, too. The analysis
as a whole reveals a great deal of creativity in both naming and packaging,
exemplified by a number of truly impressive examples.
Chapter 9 continues the discussion from the previous chapter by looking at
wine advertising in specialized magazines. It identifies similar metaphors and
instances of synesthesia as in tasting notes, though in advertisements these
can be delivered in a multimodal way. For instance, depicting a person in an
ad makes use of the metaphor of wine as a human being. However, in
quantitative terms the results show that “the immense majority of wine adverts
do little more than present bottles and/or labels in artsy ways,” (160) which
points to a considerably conservative attitude in advertising wine.
Chapter 10 deals with an entirely different type of data: three wine
documentaries about famous French (Burgundy and Champagne) and Spanish (Jerez
de la Frontera) wine regions. For each location, the authors identify
particular strategies to promote the specific wine portrayed, such as the
“festive” image of Champagne, where “in fact, throughout the entire
documentary, opening champagne bottles to celebrate Wednesdays or sunshine
looks like a perfectly spontaneous and desirable thing” (188). The main
stylistic device focused on is, again, metaphor, used in various mono- and
multimodal ways.
Chapter 11 gives a review of the previous chapters, summarizing that
“winespeak may be limited, imprecise, built on the terminologization of a
general-purpose lexicon unspecific to wine, and largely resting on figurative
language, but it is also reasonably effective and decidedly intriguing in
verbal creativity, and that makes it a very interesting field for linguistic
inquiry” (210). The book concludes with a few more points for thought that
have not been dealt with in the main part, such as the factor of subjectivity
and personal taste, the role of stemware in the appreciation of wine (''If the
glass determines the experience to such an extent, we must conclude there is
no such thing as _wine_,'' 213), and expert vs. layman perceptions and how
they are attended to by a growing market of wine literature for
non-specialists. The authors' advice on this last point: Don’t try to use
shortcuts.
EVALUATION
When first seeing the three names on the book's cover, one may be tempted to
assume that this is an edited volume. It is not, and it is to the credit of
the authors that it does not read as one either. In fact, Caballero,
Suárez-Toste and Paradis do a great job in delivering a text that mostly works
as a logically structured, coherent whole. Taken together, the chapters
provide a well-informed discussion and critical appreciation of the language
of wine in its various forms and functions.
One thing I found somewhat problematic is the strong focus on metaphor and
metonymy, which at times seem to eclipse all other aspects that might be
worthwhile analyzing in wine language, such as different types of speech acts,
narrative voice, lexical collocations, or the large number of semiotic
features outlined in the seminal paper by Graddol (1996), which is strangely
missing in the references. In the same vein, there is some redundancy in
Chapters 4, 5 and 6, which use different data to ''find'' the same linguistic
phenomena over and over again. These chapters also tend to be a bit too
descriptive, with ample presentation of examples and long lists of vocabulary
items that sometimes make it difficult to see the point.
Another point I found somewhat disappointing is that the differences between
the English and the Spanish data were not explored in more detail. There are a
few passages where this is done, for instance when discussing differences in
naming strategies (Chapter 4). However, a more systematic comparison of the
two languages might have provided some deeper insights into how winespeak
''sounds'' in different languages.
An unnecessarily high number of mistakes sometimes distracts from following
the argument. These include typos (e.g. ''Bourdaux,'' 127) and punctuation
(e.g. defining vs. non-defining relative clauses, 137), ill-formed sentences
(e.g. “This is applies to patterns such as…,'' 116), and mistaken contents
(e.g. wrong reference to an example sentence, 136). In addition, I really hate
to say that some of the illustrations were somewhat reminiscent of
prototypical corporate slides. Thus, many of the purple arrows don't seem to
make much sense (e.g. Figures 3, 6, 8) and were in fact more confusing than
helpful.
These points of criticism notwithstanding, “Representing Wine” is an
interesting piece of research that certainly holds a great number of insights
into wine language, metaphor theory, and how the process of drinking is put
into words.
REFERENCES
Graddol, David. 1996. The semiotic construction of a wine label. In Sharon
Goodman and David Graddol (eds), Redesigning English: New Texts, New
Identities, 73-80. London, Routledge.
Paradis, Carita. 2005. Ontologies and construals in lexical semantics.
Axiomathes 15. 541-573.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Peter Backhaus is Professor at the Department of English Language and
Literature at Waseda University, Tokyo. Major publications include Linguistic
Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo
(Multilingual Matters, 2007) and Care Communication: Making a Home in a
Japanese Eldercare Facility (Routledge 2017). His present research interests
are in pragmatics and stylistics.
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