6533b825fe1ef96bd1282049

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Naming sensory impressions in winespeak between professionals and non-professionals

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International audience; Connections between semantics — for instance, cognitive semantic models such as prototype theory — and sensory analysis have often been studied from an interdisciplinary perspective involving disciplines such as linguistics, cognitive psychology, and chemistry. Among the many fields concerned with this topic, this paper will focus on the particular case of winespeak and especially on the co-construction of a shared knowledge between professionals and consumers. The hypothesis to be verified is (i) that objectivist and strict terminological approaches can not account for the processes at work when professionals and non professionals try to agree on the ‘specialized meaning’ of so-called wine tasting descriptors and (ii) that a constructivist perspective should be preferred in order to improve the communication within this particular sphere, especially from a marketing perspective.The theoretical background of the study is discourse analysis applied to a specialized field: in this sense, it forms part of what Schubert (2010) labels ‘specialized communication studies’, with a special focus on authentic situated oral interactions. Accordingly, the terminological dimension of the paper is cognitive-oriented as it considers terminology not at the system level, but in use, and linked to the construction of mental representations that are shaped, at least to some extent, by the discourse itself. It thus focuses on the communicative aspects of term use by professionals.