Anthropomorphic metaphors in wine discourse, with special reference to Japanese wine manga

Abstract

Wine discourse has been readily found in the forms of wine tasting notes, reviews, advertisements, poetry, and classical literature. The popularity of Japanese wine manga, however, introduces a new venue for wine discourse and vector along which academic analysis can be conducted. In this paper, we seek to expand upon prior research on wine semantics and wine discourse by applying the framework of Cultural Linguistics to the subgenre of wine manga. Based on an original, Japanese-French bilingual corpus developed from the graphic novels Sommelier and Kami no Shizuku – each an epoch-making work, highly didactic in nature – our analysis focuses on the conceptual metaphor wine is a person. Results illustrate the Japanese authors’ contribution to the figurative language used in wine discourse. In other words, in Japan just as in France, wine is a person, and there is a shared cultural understanding of wine, or traits therein, being the embodiment of the human.