Differences in wine tasting notes in English and Spanish

• Published in: Babel (Frankfurt) 2016-01, Vol.62 (3), p.370-401
• Main Authors: López Arroyo, Belén, Roberts, Roda P.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Corpus linguistics; English language; Genre; Metaphor; Spanish language; Terminology
• ISSN: 0521-9744; 1569-9668
• DOI: 10.1075/babel.62.3.02lop

Since the early 2000s, a number of researchers have devoted themselves to the study of wine language and discourse, and especially the genre of wine tasting notes. They have analyzed various aspects of tasting notes: their rhetorical structure, their terminology, their use of metaphors, among others. What the vast majority of these studies have attempted to show is what features most tasting notes share; in other words, they have tried to identify what a typical tasting note is like. However, analysis of tasting notes corpora reveals a number of subtle differences not only from one language to another, but also within a given language. Therefore, in this paper we have attempted to identify and categorize these differences, using an English and Spanish comparable corpus, with each language corpus subdivided into three subcorpora, on the basis of the origin of the tasting notes. Differences in content categories, format and style, both in the subcorpora of each language and between the two languages, are analyzed and discussed. Overall, the English subcorpora reveal greater variation than the Spanish ones, with some features figuring prominently in a given subcorpus and being almost invisible in another.