Towards a characterization of wine tasting discourse as a language for specific purposes

Abstract

The second decade of the 20th century has been characterized by the reconsideration in linguistics on the role of the metaphor and the metonymy in the everyday language and in the specialized languages. Furthermore, the evolution of terminology made possible to leave behind the Wüsterian tradition, which considered these rhetorical figures as an ornamental element, and it has allowed to provide a new perspective of their role in the knowledge transmission. This paper is focused on the study of wine tasting discourse in a multifaceted perspective, considering lexical, morphosyntactic and pragmatic factors. Finally, this study concludes that wine tasting discourse is a language for specific purposes, whose primary role is to transmit objective information in a highly subjective process as wine tasting, which is characterized by terminological gaps. In order to avoid these gaps and to create specialized terms which could be shared by a community of users, wine tasters make use of metaphorization processes.