The Projection Problem for Predicates of Taste

Seminar by Dilip Ninan, Paris IAS Fellow, organized by Institut Jean Nicod - ENS, as part of the Linguae group seminar series.

Utterances of simple sentences containing taste predicates (e.g. "delicious", "fun'', "frightening'') typically imply that the speaker has had a particular sort of first-hand experience with the object of predication. For example, an utterance of "The carrot cake is delicious'' would typically imply that the speaker had actually tasted the cake in question, and is not, for example, merely basing her judgment on the testimony of others.
One puzzling aspect of this inference is its projection profile: although the acquaintance inference projects over negation, it fails to project out of other standard presupposition holes such as epistemic modals, the antecedents of conditionals, and questions. This curious behavior has given rise to two different theories. According to the first, the acquaintance inference is not a presuppositional inference, but an implicature, one generated by the Maxim of Quality together with a certain principle concerning the epistemology of taste (Ninan 2014). According to the second, the acquaintance inference is a presuppositional inference, but one that can be systematically obviated by certain kinds of operators (Anand & Korotkova 2018; Willer & Kennedy Forthcoming).
I will begin by discussing some problems for the implicature theory that arise in connection with disjunction and quantification. I'll then argue that a supervaluationist version of the `presupposition-plus-obviation' theory avoids these problems, and also handles the other data motivating the implicature approach. I'll then suggest that the supervaluationist theory is further supported when we examine its predictions concerning the interaction between the acquaintance requirement and various generalized quantifiers. Finally, I will turn to the question of which operators obviate and why.