A Judge-Free Semantics for Predicates of Personal Taste

We offer a new account of the semantics of predicates of personal taste (PPTs) like tasty and fun which, unlike recent proposals (Lasersohn 2005; Stephenson 2007a, 2007b), does not appeal to a judge parameter as a component of the evaluation index. We identify empirical shortcomings of previous proposals, arguing that PPTs have a first-person-oriented meaning component even in cases that seem to involve an exocentric interpretation. We propose that the interpretation of PPTs involves firstperson-oriented genericity in the sense of Moltmann (2006, 2010a). When I say This cake is tasty, I say roughly that for all worlds w and all individuals x such that x is relevant in w and I identify with x, the cake is tasty to x in w. We explain the shifting of the first person orientation from speaker to attitude holder in attitude reports by taking both matrix and embedded sentences to express properties rather than propositions (Stojanovic 2011). In both cases, an abstraction operator in the left periphery of the clause binds the variable responsible for the first-person-oriented interpretation of the sentence. The paper closes with a comparison with a similar proposal by Moltmann (2010b, forthcoming) and a discussion of the implications of our semantics for the analysis of attitudes de se.