Wine and Conversation

2. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-530793-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Format (B × H): 211 mm x 145 mm, Gewicht: 474 g

The vocabulary of wine is large and exceptionally vibrant -- from straight-forward descriptive words like "sweet" and "fragrant", colorful metaphors like "ostentatious" and "brash", to the more technical lexicon of biochemistry. The world of wine vocabulary is growing alongside the current popularity of wine itself, particularly as new words are employed by professional wine writers, who not only want to write interesting prose, but avoid repetition and cliché. The question is, what do these words mean? Can they actually reflect the objective characteristics of wine, and can two drinkers really use and understand these words in the same way?

In this second edition of Wine and Conversation, linguist Adrienne Lehrer explores whether or not wine drinkers (both novices and experts) can in fact understand wine words in the same way. Her conclusion, based on experimental results, is no. Even though experts do somewhat better than novices in some experiments, they tend to do well only on wines on which they are carefully trained and/or with which they are very familiar. Does this mean that the elaborate language we use to describe wine is essentially a charade? Lehrer shows that although scientific wine writing requires a precise and shared use of language, drinking wine and talking about it in casual, informal setting with friends is different, and the conversational goals include social bonding as well as communicating information about the wine. Lehrer also shows how language innovation and language play, clearly seen in the names of new wines and wineries, as well as wine descriptors, is yet another influence on the burgeoning and sometimes whimsical world of wine vocabulary.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lehrer, Adrienne

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Sprachsoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Semantik & Pragmatik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie des Brauchtums und der Traditionen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Preface and Acknowledgments

- Part I. The Wine Vocabulary

- 1.: The Early Wine Words

- 2.: Extending the Vocabulary

- 3.: New Wine Words

- 4.: Aromas and Wine Wheels

- 5.: Evaluating Wine: Scoring Systems

- 6: Semantic analysis

- Part II. The Experiments

- 7.: Experiments and Subjects

- 8.: The Stanford Subjects

- 9.: The Tucson Subjects

- 10.: The Davis Subjects

- 11.: Later Experiments

- 12.: Research on Taste and Smell

- Part III. Functions of Wine Talk:

- 13.: Functions of Language

- 14.: Scientific Language

- 15.: Non-Scientific Language

- 16.: Snobs, Anti-Snobs, and Marketing

- 17.: What Else is Like Wine Talk?

- 18.: Conclusion

- Appendix - A Semantic Theory by Adrienne Lehrer and Keith Lehrer

- Endnotes

- References

Über Autor(innen)

Adrienne Lehrer is Professor of Linguistics (Emerita), University of Arizona. Lehrer has written on many aspects of lexical semantics: the structures of vocabularies and how words in a language are semantically related to one another. She has used wine descriptors and cooking words to test semantic theories. Recent woek has focused on creative neologisms, especially blends and the meaning of affixes.