Abstract
This chapter makes use of two data sources, terminological schemas for wine descriptions and actual wine reviews, for the investigation of how experiences of sensory perceptions of vision, smell, taste and touch are described. In spite of all the great challenges involved in describing perceptions, professional wine reviewers are expected to be able to give an understandable account of their experiences. The reviews are explored with focus on the different types of descriptors and the ways their meanings are construed. It gives an account of the use of both property expressions, such as soft, sharp, sweet and dry and object descriptors, such as blueberry, apple and honey. It pays particular attention to the apparent cross-sensory use of descriptors, such as white aromas and soft smell, arguing that the ontological cross-over of sensory modalities are to be considered as symptoms of ‘synesthesia’ in the wine-tasting practice and monosemy at the conceptual level. In contrast to the standard view of the meanings of words for sensory perceptions, the contention is that it is not the case that, for instance, sharp in sharp smell primarily evokes a notion of touch; rather the sensory experiences are strongly interrelated in cognition. When instantiated in, say smell, soft spans the closely related sense domains, and the lexical syncretism is taken to be grounded in the workings of human sensory cognition.
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Notes
- 1.
I am grateful to Mr Robert Parker for providing the database which facilitated the work immensely (http://www.erobertparker.com/members/home.asp). I am also 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 and Eeg-Olofsson (2013). The database has also been the basis for the creation of an interactive visualization tool (Kerren et al. 2013).
- 2.
- 3.
It should be noted that long may also evoke positive or negative evaluation (Paradis et al. 2012).
- 4.
A domain is a context for the characterization of a semantic unit. Domains are mental experiences, representational spaces, concepts and concept complexes. There are basic domains and abstract domains. Basic domains cannot be reduced to more fundamental but interrelated structures. Basic domains are primitive representational spaces such as time, space, visual sensations (color), auditory sensations (pitch), touch (temperature, pressure, pain), taste/smell. Langacker (1987:147–150) notes that all human conceptualization is presumably grounded in basic domains, mediated by chains of intermediate concepts. Any other concept or conceptual complex that functions as a domain is referred to as non-basic, or abstract.
- 5.
For information, see www.deutscheweine.com.
- 6.
Please, note that this does not only apply to monochromatic but also to chromatic descriptions, see Fig. 3.1.
- 7.
For a similar argument against a metaphor/polysemy account of cross-modal sensory word meanings, see Johnson (1999). In a study of the acquisition of see he argues for a (first acquired) general meaning of see for both vision and understanding, rather than the metaphoric extension of vision to cognition and knowledge.
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Paradis, C. (2015). Conceptual Spaces at Work in Sensory Cognition: Domains, Dimensions and Distances. In: Zenker, F., Gärdenfors, P. (eds) Applications of Conceptual Spaces. Synthese Library, vol 359. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15021-5_3
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