Our research, part of a national project by the ACTRES (Contrastive Analysis and Translation English Spanish) research group, analyses sensory discourse for application in the development of writing tools aimed at assisting specialized technical writers, translators and professionals. More specifically, the project focuses on the sensory discourse of olive oil tasting. This presentation will cover two of the corpus-based research works that we have developed recently. The first analyses olive oil tasting discourse at all linguistic levels, focusing on olive oil tasting notes in the English language from a functional approach. We described the genre, its particular LSP, and its micro-linguistic features, including recurrent units of information, terms and phraseological units, as well as grammatical structures characteristic of olive oil tasting notes originally written in English. The results from the analysis were used to develop a linguistic model that is at the core of a semi-automatic tool that generates olive oil tasting notes in English—designed to help Spanish-speaking olive oil professionals communicate to a wider market. The second focuses on how sensory meaning is constructed figuratively in olive oil tasting. Meaning, in sensory language, is often built through figurative mechanisms, such as synesthetic metaphors, where a sensorial domain is used to talk about perceptions from a different sense, as in "green [vision] aroma [smell]". This work used an LSP corpus of olive oil tasing notes in English to explore the nature of synesthetic metaphors, test existent models and identify tendencies which may explain this phenomenon in sensory language.

Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P3Bl2StvaHdocl41b5hO6zMZethkMfzx/view?usp=sharing