Evaluational adjectives

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions

Restricted quantification over tastes

This paper provides an analysis of statements with predicates of personal taste (tasty, fun, etc.) Rather than directly relativizing semantic interpretation to a judge (cf., Lasershon, 2005), this paper aims to capture the phenomenon called „faultless disagreement" (the fact that one can deny a speaker's subjective utterance without challenging the speaker’s opinion) by means of pragmatic restrictions on quantification domains. Using vagueness models, a statement like the cake is tasty is analyzed as true in a partial context c iff it is true in the set of completions t consistent with c (Kamp, 1975), wherein tasty denotes different, contextually possible, taste measures (Kennedy, 1999). Phrases like for me restrict the set of completions to those with taste measures consistent with the speaker’s taste. Faultless disagreement naturally follows assuming speakers accommodate or reject implicit restrictions of this sort (Lewis, 1979)