This book explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, or Licorice is tasty. Standard semantic theories explain the meanings of sentences by specifying the conditions under which they are true; here, Peter Lasersohn asks how we can account for sentences that are concerned with matters of opinion rather than matters of fact. He argues that a truth-theoretic semantic theory is appropriate even for sentences like these, but that for such sentences, truth and falsity must be assigned relative to perspectives, rather than absolutely. The book provides a detailed and explicit formal grammar, working out the implications of this conception of truth both for simple sentences and for reports of mental attitude. The semantic analysis is paired with a pragmatic theory explaining what it means to assert a sentence which is true or false only relativistically, and with a speculative account of the functional motivation for a relativized notion of truth.

About the Author
Peter Lasersohn is Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Ohio State University in 1988, and taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Rochester before his appointment at Illinois in 1996. He is the author of two previous books, A Semantics for Groups and Events (Garland, 1990), and Plurality, Conjunction and Events (Kluwer, 1995); and of shorter articles in journals including Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, Linguistic Inquiry, Journal of Semantics, Natural Language Semantics, Synthese, and Inquiry.

Reviews
this monograph represents a welcome contribution to the study of sentences concerning matters of opinion within the framework of logical semantics. As a result, it will be particularly appealing to specialists in formal linguistics and, more generally, scholars who are interested in the study of linguistic expressions of subjectivity. * Enrico Torre, Linguist List *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199573677
Author Peter Lasersohn
Format Hardback
Page Count 294
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 684g
Dimensions(mm) 251mm * 179mm * 22mm