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RESEARCH PRODUCT

(De)terminologisation processes in wine tasting notes : How expressive are canonical and non-canonical hedonic markers?

subject

description

Following the proposal of Gautier (2018), an important part of the “terminology” of wine tasting notes is made up by hedonic markers that cannot always be treated as terms – in the traditional meaning of technical/specialised terms – as they lack a consensual definition acknowledged by field experts. The main challenges of such markers concern at least the following three dimensions: (i) they are directly linked to the gustative experience of the taster/speaker and his/her experiential memory; (ii) they are also linked to the field knowledge and the degree of expertise of the taster/speaker – be it a “true” knowledge or his/her ability to imitate expert discourse and (iii) they are mostly situated at the interface between sensory descriptors and “pure” hedonic expressions.More specifically, this study will discuss the semantic processes at work along this dividing line between terms and non-terms by analysing both the terminologisation and the determinologisation paths. It relies on a corpus of tasting notes in German, collected from online websites. The case study will be dedicated to the very interesting marker mineralisch (mineral), widely used to describe some types of white wines since about 15 years, and which exactly illustrates our research questions (cf. also Temmerman 2017). According to the degree of expertise, it functions at both levels (sensory and/or hedonic marker) and thus presents a different load of expressivity.