On Describing Olive Oil Tasting Notes in English

Abstract

Professionals use language in particular ways, which are usually very accurate and precise, to communicate among themselves. Yet, some professionals, such as those in the olive oil tasting industry, face the problem of describing subjective impressions expressed and interpreted through language. The aim of this paper is the description of the genre and the language of olive oil tasting notes in English, focusing on the ways lexical units combine in order to help olive oil tasting professionals produce acceptable olive oil tasting notes in English for their discourse community. This has been done using a corpus of olive oil tasting notes originally written in English designed and compiled ad-hoc for this purpose. Word combinations have been analysed from two perspectives: syntactic and grammatical form and function, and lexical semantics. The conclusions of these analyses and their results are intended to be a model upon which olive oil tasting language users can rely to write olive oil tasting notes with an accepted linguistic quality, allowing them to be recognised as part of the discourse community.