The phraseology of wine and olive oil tasting notes

Abstract

Specialized genres are bound to the communicative context of their discourse community. However, certain genres extend beyond one specific domain, remaining unchanged at different linguistic levels across domains. That seems to be the case of wine and olive oil tasting notes since both analyze and evaluate sensory descriptions. The present study aims at describing and comparing lexical chunks of wine and olive oil tasting notes at a semantic level to show if there is variation in the same genre across domains; we will not only describe, classify and compare lexical chunks, but also identify the way this knowledge is structured and construed in the same genre in both domains. We will test our methodology in a corpus of English tasting notes from both genres written by three different writer profiles: professionals, amateurs and wineries/mills. Our results will be useful for scholars as well as technical writers when writing tasting notes.