Old Wine, New Ethnographic Lexicography

The interests of anthropologists, focused on using the “meaning” of words and expressions as an entrée into understanding cultures, and of linguists, focused on the grammatically relevant sense components of abstract lexical forms, can be differentiated. A multicomponential lexicography is outlined for investigating various oinoglossic (“wine-talk”) registers of language, adequate to exploring this sociologically complex field of discourse spanning wine production, marketing, consumption, and connoisseurship. This approach builds on developments of the past 30 years in linguistic anthropology and related areas that have clarified the relations of structural sense, stereotypy (cultural concepts), and indexicality in language, and how and where to investigate these very different semiotic partials of language use.