Describing Sensory Experience: The Genre of Wine Reviews

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

Insertion repair

Insertion repair is a practice in which speakers halt their talk-in-progress to go back and add something else into the turn before resuming (e.g., inserting “blind” in “this girl’s fixed up on a da— a blind date”). This article provides the first systematic examination of the technology of insertion repair, based on an analysis of more than 500 instances. We first overview the practice of insertion repair; then examine how the inserted material modifies the ongoing talk. By far the most common modification is specifying: i.e., the inserted material modifies an original reference formulation so as to specify either a unique referent or a particular type of referent. A second common modification is intensifying: i.e., the inserted material modifies the original formulation so as to strengthen it. Other—much less common—modifications are describing, adjusting, and adding. Finally, we consider the relevance of our findings for conversation analytic work on repair, referring, and the relationships between grammar and action and different orders of action

How products are evaluated? Evaluation in customer review texts

This study, drawing on insights from the Appraisal framework, the parameter-based approach to evaluation and corpus linguistics, investigates the evaluative language used in customer review texts. The primary goal of this investigation is to develop a framework of evaluation that can be used to account adequately for evaluative expressions in customer review texts, and the ultimate goal is to support the argument that the modelling and theorising of evaluation is context-specific. Based on the investigation into a corpus compiled of review texts retrieved from www.amazon.co.uk, this study proposes a data-driven, parameter-based and appraisal-informed framework of evaluation which comprises four parameters—Quality, Satisfactoriness, Recommendability and Worthiness. Since these parameters are not thought-up, but are generalised from real data, it is arguable that the proposed framework of evaluation is certainly valid and thus can be used to describe and analyse evaluative language used in this particular context. This in turn indicates that the description and theorising of evaluation is indeed highly dependent on the discourse type that is under examination