Commonalities

The first and most obvious commonality between the two types of predication to be investigated here is that both predicates of personal taste, as well as relational locative expressions, exemplified in (3) and (4) below, are dependent on context for their interpretation.

To assess the truth of (3), we have to check whether the person uttering (3) is located such that Carla is sitting to her left. And to assess the truth of (4), we make sure that the person who uttered it does indeed consider haggis tasty. The context dependence here is obviously tied to the indexicals my and I, respectively. The second commonality to be noted thus is that the dependence upon context that both expressions exhibit is a type of indexicality (as opposed to, say, a type of anaphoric or presuppositional dependence). But, as the German examples (5) and (6) show, the context dependence remains even if the overt reference to the speaker is removed.¹

What these examples show is that both types of PSEs contain what may pre-theoretically be called “slots” for the expression of relational information, and that these slots can be filled by indexicals (as in (3) and (4) above), or can be left implicit (as in (5) and (6)). In both cases, one would probably want both types of expressions to contain variables for this relational information, and that the values of these variables have to be supplied by contextual parameters. As a reviewer noted, there are numerous accounts to be found in the literature on how this assignment of a value to the variable is to be spelled out at the syntax-semantics interface: by assigning a contextual parameter, by variable binding, by control, etc. Since the division between PPTs and RLEs that we want to argue for here is orthogonal to these details, we decided to (more or less randomly) pick one account (i.e., Lasersohn (2009)) and stick to that throughout our argument. Note that we chose this formal account not out of any theoretical predilection, but simply because it allows us to make explicit the interplay between PSEs and their surrounding context.

The property to provide a variable is the third commonality that the two types of expression exhibit. As one would expect in connection with the third property, there are restrictions on the types of values that the variable might take on. Lasersohn (2009) differentiates between autocentric, acentric, and exocentric assignments. In order to represent the differences between these assignments, and how they affect interpretation, we will adopt Lasersohn’s ‘toy language’ (his term; see Lasersohn (2009), p.361), an extension of the formal system developed and described in Kaplan (1989). In Lasersohn’s (2009) system, denotations are assigned to simple expressions relative to a context c, a world of evaluation w, and an individual i (see Lasersohn (2009), p.361ff. for what follows).² Thus, the denotation of an expression α is represented as ⟦α⟧^c,w,i. Lasersohn further assumes that each context c must specify a speaker or agent (notated A(c)), a world W(c), and what he calls a “judge”, J(c). This allows him to deal both with context dependent expressions such as, for example, I, which gets the denotation ⟦I⟧^c,w,i = A(c) for all c,w,i, as well as context independent ones, for which ⟦α⟧^c,w,i = ⟦α⟧c’,w,i, for all c,c’. In addition, Lasersohn provides for the possibility that the judge relative to which a predicate is to be interpreted is expressed overtly, as in tasty for John. He assumes that ⟦α for β⟧^c,w,i = ⟦α⟧^c,w,b, where b = ⟦β⟧^c,w,i. Thus, the denotation of tasty for Mary, ⟦tasty for Mary⟧^c,w,i, would be ⟦tasty⟧^c,w,Mary. Lasersohn further assumes that the content of an expression α is a function from worlds w and individuals i into the denotation of α relative to c,w, and i: ⟦α⟧^c(w,i) = ⟦α⟧^c,w,i. Finally, truth is defined as follows: “We say that a sentence ϕ is true in context c iff its content in c maps the world and judge of c onto 1, that is iff ⟦ϕ⟧^c(W(c), J(c)) = 1.” (Lasersohn (2009), p.362).

While we will not provide a compositional analysis for the interpretation of the two types of expressions, we can use this formal system to illustrate the assignment of different values to the variables contained in PPTs and RLEs. Assuming the usual semantics for predication (see Lasersohn (2009), for the details), the context-independent denotation of an utterance like

comes out, preliminary, as

Since the denotation ⟦haggis⟧^c,w,i is context-insensitive, we only have to take care that the parameter for the judge gets assigned the right value. If the utterance (7) by Craig is to be interpreted autocentrically, we get i = A(c) = J(c) = Craig, which gives us ⟦7⟧^c,w,i = 1 iff ⟦haggis⟧^c,w,i ∈ ⟦tasty⟧^c,w,Craig. Accordingly, the exocentric assignment of the judge parameter in

has the contextual parameters A(c) = Michael, while J(c) = Craig; thus, while its form is quite different from that of (7), the two utterances end up as having the same denotation, because in the case of (9), the overt expression of the judge blocks the assignment of the “agent” of (9), Michael, to the judge parameter. An acentric assignment to the judge parameter would be one that does not assign any value at all to the judge parameter, thus expressing an “objective” judgment about the taste of haggis. Such an acentric use must be kept apart from an occurence of a PPT like tasty in which the variable contained in it is quantified over, as in the following example:

Rather than assigning no value to the judge parameter, the judges covary with the individuals that the assignment function passes to the interpretation of the quantifier; see Mitchell (1986), and Partee (1989).

Although Lasersohn (2009) does not deal with spatial expressions, we can extend Lasersohn’s toy language to also cover expressions for relational locations like left of, thereby adding one more commonality between PPTs and RLEs to our list. It seems quite reasonable to assign the autocentric use of left of in (5), uttered by Michael,

the denotation ⟦left of⟧^c,w,i, where i = A(c) = Michael, which seems to give us the intuitively correct semantics: ⟦left of⟧^c,w,Michael. The truth conditions for (11) also seem to turn out correct:

Thus, the sentence comes out as true if Michael utters it in a situation where Carla is sitting to his (intrinsic) left, and false otherwise. The interpretation seems to be fully parallel to the one in (8).

Given the commonalities between the two expressions, and the successful application of the same interpretation rule to the autocentric uses, we might try to add one further commonality between the two types of expressions by treating exocentric uses of relational locatives like exocentric uses of taste predicates. As in the case of tasty, we could account for an exocentric use of left-of, and, also in parallel to PPTs, RLEs can only be used exocentrically if the relational argument is overtly expressed; we thus would assume that the denotation ⟦left of x⟧^c,w,i is ⟦left of⟧^c,w,x. Let us look at the truth conditions for the following utterance:

At first glance, it seems that the evaluation index i will take care of the correct assignment:

Apparently, just as in the case of PPTs with an overt judge, the overt expression of the spatial relatum blocks the assignment of the agent of (13) to the “judge” parameter, which in this case should probably more aptly be called “perspective parameter”. But are the truth conditions in (14) really correct? Let us consider a few scenarios that should make (13) true if (14) is the correct rendering of the truth conditions. In Scenario 1, Carla is sitting to the left of Michael, and Craig is standing behind them, aligned with Michael (Carla’s orientation is of course irrelevant). This is a scenario in which (13) comes out as true, as readers may verify for themselves.

There is, obviously, a different scenario, Scenario 2, in which the speaker, Craig, is not aligned with the relatum, Michael, but rather is standing opposite of him, facing him.

In Scenario 2, there is a reading under which (13) comes out as true, and one where it comes out as false: for the first reading, we assume that the perspective parameter gets filled by Michael; the interpretation then proceeds as in (14), and the sentence comes out as true. For this first reading, we have to suppose that Craig is taking on Michael’s perspective in uttering (13). However, the second reading is one where the perspective parameter is filled by the speaker, Craig; and this gives us a denotation for (13) that is not true in Scenario 2:

This deictic reading for left of seems to be one where the commonalities between RLEs and PPTs break down—there is no equivalent to Scenario 2 for PPTs. Furthermore, it seems that while an overt expression of the judge of an PPT can block the assignment of the speaker to the judge parameter, an overt expression of the relatum of an RLE cannot in all cases block the assignment of the speaker to the perspective parameter; rather, it can do so only in case the speaker and the relatum are aligned. No such restriction seems to exist for PPTs.

Hence, we have to rethink our strategy of parallelising the truth conditions we assign to PPTs and RLEs, despite the commonalities enumerated above: as we have surmised right from the start, one can expect there to be differences between the two types of expressions. Let us look at these in more detail.

Differences

The first, and most perspicuous, difference between the two types of expressions is that in many languages, including English, the encoding of the judge parameter of PPTs is optional, while that of the perspective parameter of RLEs seems to be mandatory. Although underlyingly both expressions seem to be relational and sensitive to context, and especially to the role that the speaker plays in filling the parameter, there are syntactic differences. This has been pointed out by Barbara Partee already (see Partee (1989), p.268), and is elaborated on by Bylinina et al. (2015), p.72f.

The second difference has to do with the possibility to block the assignment of the speaker to the judge/perspective parameter, or shift it away to a different referent, which we have discussed above with respect to example (13), and which we illustrate below in a somewhat different setting: embedding under attitude verbs.

In (16-a), the only possible assignment to the judge parameter of tasty seems to be the denotation of the subject of the attitute verb, Craig. Contrast this with (16-b), where the perspective parameter—from whose perspective Carla is sitting to his of her left—can be filled both by the expressed attitude holder, Craig, as well as the speaker/agent, Michael; probably with a slight preference for the former. Thus, it seems that RLEs are somewhat more flexible in their assignment of the perspective parameter than PPT in their assignment of the judge parameter: they are, as it were, more shiftable. We urge the reader to keep this difference between PPTs and RLEs in embedding contexts in mind, since we will return to it in our experiment.³

A third difference, and one that has been the subject of much discussion is the proneness to so-called faultless disagreement,⁴ which PPTs exhibit, while RLEs do not. Although this property has been a topic of research and lively debate in the philosophy of language for at least 15 years now, we will not enter into the discussion of faultless disagreement here, but rather only point out that there is a palpable difference between the exchanges in (17) and (18):

Evidently, the disagreement between Craig and Michael in (17) is of a different kind than that in (18). To witness: the disagreement in (18) can be settled by checking—by some appropriate analytic procedure—whether the vegetarian haggis in question contains cauliflower or not. If it does, Craig is right, and Michael is wrong, and if it does not, the other way round. For (17), there does not seem to exist an equivalent procedure of assessing who is right, and who is wrong. Actually, there does not even seem to be something to be right or wrong about. Peter Lasersohn has made this point repeatedly: while the assessment of the truth of a judge-independent predication (like λx. contains-cauliflower(x)) simply depends on matters of fact, the assessment of the truth of a sentence containing a PPT does not; it is, as Lasersohn puts it, dependent on matters of taste (see Lasersohn (2017) for extensive discussion).

A fourth point where the two types of predicates diverge is the possibility to use RLE in a derived fashion, where the perspectival center is not a sentient being, but an artifact onto which a front-back asymmetry is projected. Typical cases are cupboards, cars, etc. Consider a case where there is a person, Michael, and a ball lying on the ground; between the two, there is a car. If the front of the car is facing the ball, Michael can truthfully utter (19-a), but when the car is facing towards Michael, (19-a) is infelicitous (though perhaps not false), while (19-b) is felicitous.

Such cases of a derived origo (“Origoverschiebung” in Bühler’s (1934) original parlance), which have received different treatments in linguistic semantics (see Bierwisch (1988), Wunderlich and Herweg (1991), Aurnague and Vieu (1993), and Kracht (2002)), seem not to have any obvious equivalent in the semantics of PPTs: it is quite hard to imagine what such an equivalent, a “derived judge parameter”, might be.

A further difference between the two expression types lies in their event semantic properties: while PPTs can be used to express habitual judgments as in I find haggis tasty, which are rather temporally stable, i.e. their truth is asserted to hold for a long interval including the utterance time, but possibly also stretching into the future, the meaning of RLEs lacks such longevity; which is not very surprising, given that the relative locations of objects, even if they are non-movable, are highly dependent on the location of the origo (see Skopeteas, Hörnig, and Weskott (2008) for discussion).⁵ In other words: although the meaning of both types of expressions has to be time-sensitive, they seem to differ with respect to the intervals they describe, simply because—and we are fully aware that this is truistic—in most cases, people’s localisations relative to objects change faster than their tastes do.

Finally, the root of the differences enumerated so far, probably lies in the ontological differences between “judges” and “perspectives”, that is, the values that get assigned to the parameters of PPTs and RLEs, respectively. A judge has to be a sentient being, perhaps even a sentient being capable of expressing a judgment (though that is not entirely clear), and the perceptions of this sentient being have to be (mentally) represented on a scale: in order to be able to find something tasty, one has to have a comparison class, i.e. a set of objects with a (partial) ordering relation defined over that set. In comparison, a perspective is an object of an ontologically quite different kind: in the simplest case, it can be defined by two locations and a vector (e.g., in a Euclidian space); or a geometric point, and a projection (see Abusch and Rooth (2017)). Objects such as these, which figure in the semantics of RLEs, are clearly ontologically less complex than the scales involved in the semantics of PPTs. Note also that the origin of the vector or the projection of the perspective encoded in an RLE does not have to be a sentient being, nor one being capable of forming judgments; a camera, or, as we have seen, even a cupboard, is sufficient for inducing a perspective, although both artifacts have “inherited” their perspective from a human projecting it onto them. It should be noted, however, that spatial expressions can also be used to denote scalar arrangements—think, for example, of relational expressions like further behind, etc.; but these usages are derivative of the basic use of spatial prepositions and adverbs. Furthermore, as was pointed out to us by Sarah Zobel (p.c.), comparatives and superlatives of RLEs seem to be quite odd, at least in predicative use:

This contrasts with the perfectly acceptable comparative and superlative usages of PPTs:

To sum up: despite the initial prospects of providing a uniform semantic treatment for the two types of expressions, and despite some apparent semantic similarities, we have found them to differ in quite crucial respects. This raises the question whether the class of perspective-sensitive expressions is as uniform as one would consider it to be at first glance. In addition, we want to raise the question whether the two types of expressions can be shown to be interpreted differently in actual comprehension; if they can, this would be evidence against their uniformity.

Participants

We tested 40 speakers of American English over 18 years of age, 19 of which identified as female, 20 as male, and one which did not identify as female or male.

Materials

One item consisted of a linguistic description of the scenario, a pictorial representation of the decision situation, and a decision prompt; this structure was common to both experimental items and fillers. Also common was the depicted and described situation: two protagonists are involved in a box-picking game at a table. On the picture belonging to each picture, the participants saw the two protagonists seated opposite each other, with a table between them, on which the boxes are either placed on the line between the two, or perpendicularly. In the exact middle between the two boxes there is a flower, serving the role of a non-oriented relatum object (the depiction of the flower was centrosymmetric). Both protagonists are depicted schematically and symmetric to the horizontal axis of the picture, and they are named.

The RLE items had a relatively simple structure: there was a context sentence (above the scenario picture in Figure 3), the critical sentence, and the decision prompt (both below the picture).

Figure 1

First scenario: Michael and Craig are aligned.

Figure 2

Second scenario: Michael and Craig are facing each other.

Figure 3

Sample stimulus in the RLE/–embedded condition.

The RLEs employed in our materials were to the left of, to the right of, in front of, and behind. In order to render the presentation of the stimuli in the PPT condition as similar as possible to that in the RLE condition, the PPT items were headed by a more elaborate context, in which the taste preferences, or general attitudes toward the boxes were established; the target sentences and decision prompts were the same as in the RLE condition. Figure 4 illustrates the presentation of the PPT items:

Figure 4

Sample stimulus in the PPT/+embedded condition.

The 12 items thus consisted of 12 pairs of PPTs, each pair consisting of a predicate with a positive valence (e.g., inspiring, fascinating, astonishing) and a predicate with a negative valence (such as boring, annoying, disturbing). The PPTs were chosen following the criteria in McNally and Stojanovic (2014), and were additionally matched against the stimulus-bias scores in Bott and Solstad (2014) and Ferstl, Garnham, and Manouilidou (2011).

Thus, depending on the condition of the item, either the position (RLE), or the surface of the boxes would vary. There were 24 items overall: 12 PPTs, and 12 RLEs. Within these, there were six +embedded, and six –embedded items, respectively. In addition, we varied, and counterbalanced, as far as that was possible, a number of further variables: (i) the box-taking verb (rotating through the verbs choose, pick, select and take; (ii) the position of the target box (the box that would correspond to a shifted reading of the PPT, or the RLE) was counterbalanced (whether it was to the left/front/right, or behind the flower); (iii) the position of the active protagonist (the “box-taker”); (iv) the pattern on the target box (rotating through the patterns); (v) the pairs of patterns for the box pairs; and (vi) the gender of the protagonists. The embedding verb in the +emb condition was held (to think).

In addition to the 24 experimental items, there were 24 filler items, four of which served as benchmarking items. The fillers had linguistic descriptions like ‘Luke and Maya are playing a game. Luke will pick the box with some/most of the stars. Click on the box that Luke will pick.’, along with a picture that fitted the description semantically, or only by drawing an implicature. For four of these fillers, the descriptions did not even fit semantically; these served the purpose of detecting tired or unattentive participants. Four lists were created according to a latin-square design; the resulting lists were splitted into two blocks, and these blocks were randomized. Each block started with a filler.

Procedure

The experiment was administered via Amazon Mechanical Turk. First, participants were informed about their rights, and the setup of the experiment was explained, and a few sociographic variables were collected. Participants were then given two sample items to familiarise themselves with the task. Then the experiment with the 48 trials would start.

Design and Predictions

By nesting the factor EMBEDDING (+embedded vs. –embedded) under the between-items factor PERSPECTIVE-SENSITIVE EXPRESSION (PPT vs. RLE; henceforth PSE for short), we obtained four conditions, which we illustrate below:

The factor PSE was tested within-participants and between-items; the factor EMBEDDING was tested within-within.

Firstly, we predicted a main effect of the factor EMBEDDING, meaning that the box that corresponds to the intrinsic, i.e. shifted interpretation of the PPT/RLE of the box-taker (Hazel, or Heather, respectively, in the examples above; the “box-taker box”) will be picked more often in the (–emb) conditions, because there is no competitor for the assignment of the perspective/judge parameter to the variable of the PSE, while in the (+emb), the other box (corresponding to the intrinsic interpretation of the other protagonist) should be picked more often.

Based on our theoretical considerations, we further predicted an interaction of the factors EMBEDDING and TYPE OF PSE: RLEs show a greater flexibility in the assignment of the perspective/judge variable than PPTs (recall the section on the differences between the two types of PSEs, and in particular the discussion below example (16)). Thus, RLEs should be more easy to shift towards the subject denoting the attitude holder in the (+emb) conditions than PPTs, while we would not expect any difference in the (–emb) conditions. Thus, the difference in proportions of decisions for the box-taker box (RLE-PPT) should be negative in the two (+emb) conditions, and close to zero in the two (–emb) conditions.