Abstract
AbstractThis 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.
Highlights
Literatures in descriptive linguistics highlight the richness of evaluativity in natural language and discourse (Hunston & Thompson 1999, Martin & White 2005, Hunston 2011)
The aim of this paper is to develop an improved linguistic account of the broader spectrum of predicates of normative and epistemic evaluation
While the informal point that Predicates of personal taste (PPTs) are associated with a “perspective” on taste isn’t uncommon, previous formal implementations often fail to clearly distinguish perspective-sensitivity from other such sources of context-sensitivity, and fail to generalize across the range of adjectives patterning in the ways described in §§2.1–2.2.22 The following sections develop a semantics and pragmatics for evaluational adjectives that improves in these respects
Summary
Literatures in descriptive linguistics highlight the richness of evaluativity in natural language and discourse (Hunston & Thompson 1999, Martin & White 2005, Hunston 2011). Evaluational adjectives are distinguished empirically from RGAs such as ‘tall’ in exhibiting certain distinctive discourse phenomena, embedding phenomena, and vagueness phenomena in the comparative form Such phenomena, often associated with context-sensitivity, include (what I call) discourseoriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb ‘find’, and, surprisingly, sorites-susceptibility. I propose that diagnostics such as embedding under ‘find’ be explained not in terms of some pretheoretic notion of subjectivity, but in terms of an independently attested kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. This kind of use can be precisely characterized in light of the formal semantics and pragmatics from §3. The hope is that the discussion of evaluational adjectives in this paper may encourage more fruitful approaches to current debates and new avenues for research on evaluativity and attitude expression in natural language
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