Abstract
Perspective-taking is fundamental for language comprehension, including the interpretation of subjective adjectives (e.g., fun, tasty, and amazing). To understand these adjectives, one needs to know whose opinion is being conveyed—in other words, who is the attitude-holder or perspectival center. Although the perspective-sensitivity of subjective adjectives has received considerable attention in prior work in formal semantics, potential effects of sensory modality (e.g., sight, taste, and smell) on the process of attitude-holder identification have not been systematically investigated. This paper reports a series of studies testing whether interpretation of subjective adjectives depends on whether they refer to the visual, olfactory (smell) vs. gustatory (taste) domains. The results provide evidence that sensory modality has a significant impact on the process of identifying the attitude-holder. This outcome suggests that perspective-sensitivity is highly context-dependent, and the observed modality effects align well with the biological and social properties of sight, taste, and smell.
Highlights
Subjective opinions are fundamental to human cognition and perception (e.g., Markus and Zajonc, 1985; Jarvis and Petty, 1996), and language contains a wide range of subjective expressions, including a class of adjectives known as predicates of personal taste (PPTs), such as fun, tasty, disgusting, amazing, that reflect opinions
This paper reports three experiments testing if identification of the attitude-holder of subjective adjectives ( PPTs) in English is influenced by (i) whether the adjective is presented in a modality-neutral way or associated with a sensory modality, and (ii) whether different sensory modalities differ in how they impact the process of attitude-holder identification
The results of Experiment 1 show that sensory modality has a significant impact on the process of identifying the attitudeholder of predicates of personal taste (PPTs)
Summary
Subjective opinions are fundamental to human cognition and perception (e.g., Markus and Zajonc, 1985; Jarvis and Petty, 1996), and language contains a wide range of subjective expressions, including a class of adjectives known as predicates of personal taste (PPTs), such as fun, tasty, disgusting, amazing, that reflect opinions. These subjective adjectives differ from objective adjectives, such as wooden, organic or Finnish. Sensory Modality and Perspective-Taking intuitively, a fundamental aspect of successfully comprehending a PPT involves identification of the intended attitude-holder
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