MULTIPLE INDEXING RELATIVISM ABOUT PREDICATES OF TASTE

The Syntax of Taste 1: Introduction: Predicates of personal taste

Expressive Content and Predicates of Personal Taste

It is not straightforwardly clear how we might provide truth conditions for sentences containing predicates of personal taste (henceforth PoPTs), e.g. fun. According to Lasersohn (2005) a semantic theory of PoPTs must account for the intuition that each of the speakers in (1) is expressing a true statement, and yet B is directly contradicting A. This is known as the problem of faultless disagre...

Perspective in Taste Predicates and Epistemic Modals

What if any role is played by perspective—whom the licorice is tasty to, whose evidence allows for licorice in the cupboard—in the semantics of such sentences? I will argue that taste predicates like “tasty” and “fun” project syntactically real experiencer arguments, which specify the perspective at issue. Thus 1 basically means [licorice is tasty to——], with the blank filled in by the speech c...

A Judge-Free Semantics for Predicates of Personal Taste

We offer a new account of the semantics of predicates of personal taste (PPTs) like tasty and fun which, unlike recent proposals (Lasersohn 2005; Stephenson 2007a, 2007b), does not appeal to a judge parameter as a component of the evaluation index. We identify empirical shortcomings of previous proposals, arguing that PPTs have a first-person-oriented meaning component even in cases that seem t...

Judge dependence , epistemic modals , and predicates of personal taste

Predicates of personal taste (fun, tasty) and epistemic modals (might, must) share a similar analytical difficulty in determining whose taste or knowledge is being expressed. Accordingly, they have parallel behavior in attitude reports and in a certain kind of disagreement. On the other hand, they differ in how freely they can be linked to a contextually salient individual, with epistemic modal...