Wine tasting notes as formulaic texts

Abstract

The linguistic term “formulaic language” refers to fixed expressions or sequences of words that are often used as a single unit and are typically stored in memory and retrieved as complete units during communication, rather than being constructed or analyzed anew each time by the rules of grammar. Today, however, the concept of formulaicity has expanded beyond individual word combinations to include larger units as formulaic texts. In certain text genres such as abstracts and recipes, formulaicity is visible not only at the level of wording, but also in text content, structure, and layout. But it has not been examined in other text genres where professionals could benefit from this fixed structure in order to produce acceptable texts. In the present article we aim to analyze if wine tasting notes can be considered formulaic in nature. To meet our expectations, a corpus of wine tasting notes written originally in English will be used and collocations that help build up a text examined; by using Biel’s text-organizing patterns and term-embedding collocations, and by analyzing tasting notes in terms of Gülich’s criteria for formulaic texts, the present study will try to show if wine tasting notes are indeed formulaic. Our findings enhance dictionary entries by capturing the full spectrum of sensory experiences and professional terminology in oenology, improving lexical entries in both oenology and general monolingual dictionaries through the identification and categorization of formulaic language in wine tasting notes.