A Judge-Free Semantics for Predicates of Personal Taste
نویسنده
چکیده
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 to involve an exocentric interpretation. We propose that the interpretation of PPTs involves firstperson-oriented genericity in the sense of Moltmann (2006, 2010a). When I say This cake is tasty, I say roughly that for all worlds w and all individuals x such that x is relevant in w and I identify with x, the cake is tasty to x in w. We explain the shifting of the first person orientation from speaker to attitude holder in attitude reports by taking both matrix and embedded sentences to express properties rather than propositions (Stojanovic 2011). In both cases, an abstraction operator in the left periphery of the clause binds the variable responsible for the first-person-oriented interpretation of the sentence. The paper closes with a comparison with a similar proposal by Moltmann (2010b, forthcoming) and a discussion of the implications of our semantics for the analysis of attitudes de se.
منابع مشابه
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...
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عنوان ژورنال:
- J. Semantics
دوره 30 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2013