Exploring Valence in Judgments of Taste

Abstract

Judgments of taste are often assumed to be evaluative in the sense of expressing either a positive or a negative assessment of the object under evaluation. However, the evaluative character of predicates of personal taste (PPTs) has received relatively little attention from a semantic point of view. Our aim is to fill out this lacuna. We show that PPTs do not divide neatly into positively and negatively valenced terms. Instead, we suggest that many PPTs, such as ‘surprising’ and ‘intense’, are neutral: they are underspecified for their valence and, depending on the context, can give rise to a positive, a negative, or an ambivalent evaluation. We investigate how such neutral PPTs differ from evaluative PPTs and how they differ from certain other terms that are neither positive nor negative, such as ‘average’. We use a two-pronged approach. First, we propose two novel linguistic tests that serve as diagnostics to distinguish the class of neutral PPTs from valenced PPTs, and we use corpus examples to corroborate the tests. Second, we use information from preexisting psychological norms of valence to further explore the class of adjectives that we hypothesize are neutral.