From the glass through the nose and the mouth: Motion in the description of sensory data about wine in English and Spanish

Abstract

Motion verbs are often used to predicate entities such as roads, paths and the like as in “ The road snakes to the port of Shakespeare Bay before climbing over the last hill to Picton” or “La carretera serpentea unos 30 kilometros entre las montanas de la cordillera Nipe”. The verbs foreground the path configuration and dynamic rendering of things that cannot move – a phenomenon known as fictive motion ( Langacker 1987 ; Talmy 1996 ). However, motion verbs are also frequent components in specialized contexts such as wine discourse, where they communicate different sensory experience of wines as in “Exotic, exuding red berry aromas and flavors that sneak up on you rather than hit you over the head”, “Bright and focused, offering delicious flavors that glide smoothly through the silky finish”, or “En boca tiene una magnifica entrada, aunque en el paso sobresalen rasgos vegetales y se precipita hacia un final en el que predominan notas tostadas y amargas”. Using two corpora of tasting notes written in English and in Spanish, I examine the motion expressions used to communicate the sensory experiences of the wines and explore the motivations for their use in descriptions of wines’ aromas, flavours and mouthfeel. Three questions are at the heart of this study. They are (i) what types of scenarios are described through motion expressions, (ii) what sensory perceptions do they describe, and (iii) what may the differences between English and Spanish be?