The semantics of taste in interaction

Abstract

Tasting sessions constitute a perspicuous setting that reveals how a community of practice uses and shapes specialized lexicons and semantics within a situated and embodied activity. The activity aims at associating words and sensations: Participants engage with material objects (samples to taste), and utter/write down words corresponding to the way they experience them through their senses. This association between words and sensorial qualities constitutes an endogenous semantic task. This task can be seen as a respecification of various semantic problems, addressing within social interaction several semantic issues, such as the embodied grounding of sensory semantics, qualia, sensory lexicons, and specialized terminological repertoires. The paper is based on video recordings of training tasting sessions for professional cheese tasters in Italy and Italian Switzerland. The analyses show how participants engage not only in describing sensorial features, but also in normatively assessing the descriptors used, categorizing them as well as the features described as more or less standard. Moreover, the descriptive task is also guided by the use of several artefacts, such as tasting sheets to fill in and official repertoires of terminology available to read, which further socialize the participants. The analysis shows the reflexive mutual shaping of lexicons and sensations as well as the way participants address the semantics of taste in situ.