Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 55(3), 2019, pp. 601–629
© Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
doi: 10.1515/psicl-2019-0022
METAPHORS IN POLISH WINE DISCOURSE:
A CORPUS APPROACH
MAGDALENA ZAWISŁAWSKA AND MARTA FALKOWSKA
zawisla@uw.edu.pl m.falkowska@uw.edu.pl
University of Warsaw
ABSTRACT
This 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 meta-
phors. Polish wine discourse is juxtaposed against other thematic types of discourse in-
cluded 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 consti-
tute a significant part of Polish metaphorical expressions in wine discourse, we have ob-
served 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 at-
tempts to create a universal model of synesthesia in language, and call into question the
existing models of source-to-target mappings for synesthetic metaphors.
KEYWORDS: Metaphor; corpus; verbal synesthesia; wine discourse.
1. Introduction
The culture of wine tasting is a relatively new phenomenon in Poland. In 2016,
wine consumption in Poland amounted to 5.5 liters per capita (and only 3 liters
per capita in 2013). While Poland is still far behind other European countries
(e.g., in the Czech Republic, people drink 21 liters per capita, in Germany, 28,
in Italy, 44, and a typical French person consumes 50 liters of wine yearly), it is
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