Judgement, taste and closely related Germanic languages

Abstract

We will look at a treatment of the semantics of taste predicates using TTR (Type Theory with Records). The central idea is that we take the notion of judgement from type theory as basic and derive a notion of truth from that, rather than starting from a semantics based on a notion of truth and trying to modify it to include a notion of judgement. Our analysis involves two types of propositions: Austinian propositions, whose components include a situation and a type, and a subtype of Austinian propositions called subjective Austinian propositions, whose components in addition include an agent who makes the judgement that the situation is of the type. We will argue that attitude verbs can select either for propositions in general (subjective or objective) or for subjective propositions, but that there is no type of objective propositions which can be selected for. We will discuss some apparent counterexamples to this from Germanic languages and argue that there is a phenomenon akin to switch reference in certain attitude predicates when their complement involves a subjective proposition.