An Exploratory Study On The Principal Pragmatic Processes In Interpreting Predicates Of Personal Taste

Though it is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday life,making judgments of personal taste such as “Coriander is tasty” turns out to be puzzling.In recent decades,how to interpret the intuitive judgments of sentences containing such predicates whose classic examples are tasty,delicious,fun and disgusting has provoked a lively and wide-ranging debate within the fields of linguistics and philosophy of language.A significant number of illuminating approaches to interpreting the puzzling utterance meaning expressed by such predicates have been adopted while none of them has proven wholly satisfactory.Most of the studies to date are conducted within the field of philosophy of language,while studies focusing on pragmatic processes are rare.The present study aims at explicating the puzzling judgments of predicates of personal taste on the basis of a Semantic Contextualist account.Specifically,it explores the principal pragmatic processes in interpreting sentences containing predicates of personal taste and endeavors to explicate how the underdetermined content is recovered and an acceptable utterance interpretation is gained as a result.By and large,exploratory conclusions from the present study are that the judgment on sentences containing predicates of personal taste is significantly affected by the interference of contextual factors and a variety of pragmatic processes surely play an indispensable role in retrieving the intuitive truth-conditional content,which further helps to address the issue of the so-called “faultless disagreement” arising out of sentences containing predicates of personal taste.Examples of references resolution,saturation,modulation and ad hoc concept construction are analyzed.These findings partially support the contextualist account of predicates of personal taste and are of use for future studies on interpreting utterance meaning and on the interface between semantics and pragmatics.