Metaphors in Polish wine discourse: A corpus approach

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents various types of metaphors within the emergent wine discourse in Polish. The analysis is corpus-based and it employs examples excerpted from Synamet – a semantically and morphosyntactically annotated corpus of Polish synesthetic metaphors. Polish wine discourse is juxtaposed against other thematic types of discourse included in the corpus, e.g., texts devoted to perfume, beer, or music, in order to point to their specificity with respect to metaphorical productivity. This comprehensive study of metaphorical expressions and the statistical analysis of the corpus clearly show which source frames are predominant in the conceptualization of wine taste, and which frame elements are most frequently activated. Apart from lexicalized metaphors, which constitute a significant part of Polish metaphorical expressions in wine discourse, we have observed many instances of creative elaboration of basic metaphorical images. Polish wine discourse also abounds with atypical metaphors that cannot be fully accounted for in terms of cross-domain mappings. These textual phenomena include layered metaphors, mixed metaphors, and narrative metaphors. The results of the analysis undermine the attempts to create a universal model of synesthesia in language, and call into question the existing models of source-to-target mappings for synesthetic metaphors.