Verbalised Sensoriality or Amusing Embellishment? A Critical Metaphor Analysis of Personification in Promotional Wine Discourse

Metaphor plays such a key role in winespeak that scholars suggest wine could not be discussed without it. Among conceptual metaphors in wine writing, wine is a human being has been found to be ubiquitous in different genres various languages. Considering its potential to enhance empathy by relying on shared – sometimes universal – mental models and its pervasiveness in the discourse community, it is believed that the use of personification in wine discourse deserves special attention. Research on this topic has often been limited to veryifing the presence of personification instances, without placing an overt critical emphasis on it. Instead, imbalanced power dynamics might emerge between experts and non- experts and between the non- expert and the wine itself when understood as a human being following extensive and deeply- rooted personification. The study is indebted to Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) developed by Charteris- Black (2004) out of the alignment of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff/ Johnson 1980) with Critical Discourse Studies (CDS). by relying on a joint qualitative and quantitative approach, the research aims at (i) the quantification of the different non- terminologised personifications in promotional tasting notes (TNs); (ii) their interpretation; and (iii) the exploration of the “social agency that is involved in the[ir] production” (Charteris- Black 2004: 39) and the resulting power dynamics between experts and less knowledgeable (would- be) members of the discourse community. The corpus used for this study comprised 5,305 promotional tasting- notes totalling 178,928 tokens describing UK and non- UK wines extracted from 10 online multi- brand wines stores based in the UK.