Abstract

This paper attempts a corpus-based metaphorical analysis of wine discourse as part of investigating how metaphor functions in a particular context, wine discourse. This preliminary research is based on Lakoff and Johnson's claim that all thinking is originated from bodily experience and metaphor is rooted in "a fundamental embodied cognitive mechanism" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). This cognitive view considers metaphor as an everyday language and thoughts embedded in a basic cognitive instrument of human beings, as opposed to the traditional view that metaphor is used for a decorative purpose. Aiming at efficient and precise sampling rather than intuition-oriented data processing, a corpus-based method is applied in extracting the keywords from wine tasting notes, followed by manual selection of actual cases of metaphor from among these keywords. In referring to Caballero and Suarez-Toste's (2008) categorization of conceptual metaphors in "winespeak," potential problems and prospects of metaphorical analysis of wine discourse are also discussed.