Taste predicates and the acquaintance inference

By Dilip Ninan. 2014

89 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Simple sentences containing predicates like "tasty and "beautiful" typically suggest that the speaker has first-hand knowledge of the item being evaluated. I consider two explanations of this "acquaintance inference": a presuppositional approach, and a pragmatic-epistemic approach. The presuppositional approach has a number of virtues, but runs into trouble because the acquaintance inference has a very different projection pattern from that of standard presuppositions. The pragmatic-epistemic approach accounts for the main data discussed in the paper, but faces challenges of its own.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a61252c65963093468f01e86477845dcf65996d0