Shifty behavior: Investigating predicates of personal taste and perspectival anaphors

Abstract

Many expressions in language are perspective-sensitive, including predicates of personal taste and some anaphoric forms. This paper reports experiments testing sentences like Nora told/heard from Amy about the frightening photograph of her/herself, with two perspective-sensitive elements, to see whether and how identification of the judge of predicates of personal taste relates to identification of the antecedent of pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs. This allows to us test if they follow a shift-together constraint requiring them to be interpreted relative to the same perspectival center. Our results corroborate earlier findings on the source/perceiver biases of reflexives and pronouns, and reveal a strong preference to interpret the individual who is the source of information as the judge, but do not provide clear evidence for a shift-together constraint on the interpretation of PPTs and pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs.