Manner-of-motion verbs in wine description

Manner-of-motion verbs are frequently used in English narratives to portray motion events in vivid terms. This use of motion verbs contrasts with their use in non-narrative texts where the verbs are used to qualify static entities, and often instantiate figurative phenomena. The present paper explores the use of motion verbs in the descriptive-plus-evaluative genre of the wine tasting note. The discussion draws upon the results of an ongoing research project dealing with figurative language in wine discourse, and is theoretically anchored in research done in cognitive linguistics. My goals in this paper are two: on the one hand, I describe the way the expressions are used in the genre and the reasons underlying this use; on the other, I discuss the figurative motivation of the motion verbs in the genre under analysis, particularly their reliance on synesthetic metaphor and metonymy, respectively.