Taste predicates and the acquaintance inference

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...

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...

Context Dependence , Disagreement , and Predicates of Personal Taste

This paper argues that truth values of sentences containing predicates of ‘‘personal taste’’ such as fun or tasty must be relativized to individuals. This relativization is of truth value only, and does not involve a relativization of semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the same content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Non...