Abstract
Assertions about appearances license inferences about the speaker’s perceptual experience. For instance, if I assert, Tom looks like he’s cooking, you will infer both that I am visually acquainted with Tom (what I call the individual acquaintance inference), and that I am visually acquainted with evidence that Tom is cooking (what I call the evidential acquaintance inference). By contrast, if I assert, It looks like Tom is cooking, only the latter inference is licensed. I develop an account of the acquaintance inferences of appearance assertions building on two main previous lines of research: first, the copy raising literature, which has aimed to account for individual acquaintance inferences through the perceptual source semantic role; second, the subjectivity literature, which has focused on the status of acquaintance inferences with predicates of personal taste, but hasn’t given much attention to the added complexities introduced by appearance language. I begin by developing what I take to be the most empirically-sound version of a perceptual source analysis. I then show how its insights can be maintained, while however taking anything about perception out of the truth conditions of appearance sentences. This, together with the assumption that appearance assertions express experiential attitudes, allows us to capture the acquaintance inferences of bare appearance assertions without making incorrect predictions about the behavior of appearance verbs in embedded environments.
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Notes
This is not without exception. For instance, so-called “exocentric” uses of predicates of personal taste (Lasersohn 2005), as in (i), do not give rise to the inference that the speaker is acquainted with any stimulus.
The default, however, is that taste claims license this inference. And that is the phenomenon I am concerned with here.
It also has no analogue with aesthetic or moral language, which are other domains in which the acquaintance inference, or something related, seems to arise. On the aesthetic case, see e.g., Wollheim (1980), Mothersill (1984), on the moral, Hopkins (2007), McGrath (2009, 2011), Hills (2013), Willer and Kennedy (2020).
It is an open question whether Brook’s style of explanation for the diachronic change towards like-complement forms can still be maintained, even if that thesis is rejected. I suspect the answer is yes, but I won’t pursue it further here.
Note that despite a publication date earlier than that of Asudeh and Toivonen (2012), Landau is partly responding to their paper, which had been circulating in draft form.
Potsdam and Runner (2001) hold a related view, though not couched in terms of the perceptual source.
I follow Landau (2011) in presenting this as an ambiguity or polysemy in the appearance verb (e.g., 798, 806). Ultimately, though, one would hope for an account that recognizes more of a connection between the two meanings. Note that some details of my presentation depart from Landau’s. I continue to follow Asudeh and Toivonen in including existential quantification over the Psource in cases where it is unspecified, which Landau does not. I also provide semantic clauses that require embedded “copy” pronouns in all cases. This is for simplicity, as I will not discuss copy-less cases, like (i), in this paper.
Constraints on when a copy pronoun is needed are a key concern in Landau (2009, 2011); see also Asudeh and Toivonen (2012, Sect. 2.2) and Kim (2014).
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to explore this option.
There has been to my knowledge only one proposed counterexample to Psource Uniformity in the previous literature that is perceptual. It is the case in (i), due to Doran (2015, 11).
This kind of counterexample also occurs with seem and look, as in (ii) (Rudolph 2019a).
While these examples may help my case against Psource Uniformity, I will not rely on them here. Intuitions about the acceptability of the copy raising assertions in these contexts are inconsistent (based on informal conversations; to my knowledge such cases have not been experimentally tested). And one might worry that some kind of pragmatic repair strategy is going on due to the impossibility of something absent being perceived.
I first discussed this case, and some of those to follow, in Rudolph (2019c). There, the judgments are backed up with experimental work showing that speakers judged the copy raising and expletive subject assertions equally acceptable in the “absent experienced cook” scenario, whereas they judged the copy raising assertion significantly less acceptable than the expletive subject one in the original “absent cook” scenario—thus confirming Asudeh and Toivonen’s data in their particular case, but casting doubt on its generalizability.
However, look is noticeably less flexible than seem in this regard. While experimental results confirmed that the look variants of (18a) and (18b) are equally acceptable in the “office” context, results with other examples showed look to be less flexible than seem in admitting non-Psource readings in copy raising sentences. For instance, when the look variant on the “absent experienced cook” was tested, speakers judged the copy raising sentence significantly less acceptable than the expletive subject one (Rudolph 2019a).
The rejection of Psource Uniformity for look and seem still leaves us with a key open question: When can the non-Psource versions of these verbs be used in copy raising sentences? It must be restricted, for otherwise it is mysterious why any copy raising sentences with seem or look are unacceptable without perception of the referent of the subject. Hearers could just interpret the sentence using the non-Psource version whenever called for by the principle of charity. But this is evidently not possible, since if it were then we would expect the copy raising sentence in the case of the absent cook to be acceptable. And yet it clearly isn’t.
Rudolph (2019c) hypothesizes that the non-Psource seem is more easily available when the embedded clause is about an individual-level property (roughly, a standing property) of the subject, as opposed to a stage-level property (roughly, a transient property) (Carlson 1977; Kratzer 1995). Cooking denotes a stage-level property, so the non-Psource interpretation is unavailable in the absent cook case. But an experienced cook denotes an individual-level property, so the non-Psource interpretation is available in the absent experienced cook case. One might wonder, having reached this point, whether a revised Psource Uniformity thesis might be formulated: one that assigns to seem and look a single meaning in all copy raising sentences, but that only requires the subject to play some role weaker than the perceptual source. For discussion of this possibility and challenges it faces, see Rudolph (2019c, Sect. 6).
Asudeh and Toivonen (2012) draw a distinction between thematic roles, of which agent is an example, and semantic roles that are not thematic, of which the Psource is an example. However, the difference is not material to my discussion here.
Within the copy raising literature, Rett and Hyams (2014) may be able to avoid this problem. Though they follow Asudeh and Toivonen in including the Psource in their analysis, they take it to be part of the not-at-issue content of appearance assertions. However, they do not discuss how their analysis makes the right predictions about the kinds of embedding constructions I will discuss below. The proposal that I will develop in this section—which does away with the Psource altogether—is, I believe, better equipped to make those predictions.
For related discussion in connection with the acquaintance inference with predicates of personal taste, see Ninan (2014), Muñoz (2019). Note that these considerations do not rule out an analysis on which the acquaintance inference is a special kind of presupposition, which can be “obviated” by certain operators, as in, e.g., Anand and Korotkova (2018), Ninan (2020).
Alternatively, the presupposition in (27) may be locally accommodated, implying that Mary probably smoked in the past. But the analogue, that someone has probably seen the set, also fails to be implied in (28).
I work with this theory in order to offer a concrete illustration of how a promising approach to the acquaintance inference with PPTs may be extended to appearance language. I do not rule out that other viable approaches developed for PPTs may also be adapted in this way. Further options worth considering include those in Anand and Korotkova (2018), Muñoz (2019), Kennedy and Willer (2020), Ninan (2020). My first attempt at an expressivist account of the acquaintance inference, which shares some features with the view I present here, is in Rudolph (2019b, chap. 4).
One might wonder whether the integrity and grounding conditions could be fulfilled in ways that pull in opposite directions. For instance, I can see Tom well enough to tell whether his appearance gives evidence that he’s cooking (so grounding is satisfied), but that appearance gives evidence against him cooking; and yet for independent reasons, I’m committed to the truth of his appearance in fact evidencing that he’s cooking (so integrity is also satisfied). This is a scenario where I have reason to think my perception of Tom is not picking up his “true” appearance. Because the sincerity conditions are both satisfied, we might expect that the assertion, Tom looks like he’s cooking, should be felicitous; and yet, my intuition is that it is not. Because of this, we may need to strengthen the experiential grounding condition to require that the speaker’s experiences positively decide in favor of the embedded claim. Thanks to Patrick Muñoz and Melissa Fusco for feedback on this issue.
When applied to the sentences in question, this requirement of experiential grounding looks very similar to a requirement of direct evidentiality—and some accounts of the acquaintance inference with subjective language have indeed tied it to direct evidentiality (Muñoz 2019; Klempner 2018; Anand and Korotkova 2018). Willer and Kennedy (2020) resist taking all acquaintance-type requirements to stem from requirements of direct evidentiality, largely because of their aim to unify the acquaintance inference with predicates of personal taste with a similar phenomenon with moral language. I don’t wish to take a stand on that issue here, and so do not claim to have ruled out direct evidentiality accounts of acquaintance inferences. Importantly, taking there to be direct evidentiality requirements on experiential assertions is fully compatible with the claim, in Asudeh and Toivonen (2017), that appearance constructions also covey indirect evidential information: namely, that the speaker only has indirect evidence for the embedded claim. One can have direct perceptual evidence for the copy raising claim, Tom looks like he’s cooking, while having only indirect evidence for the embedded claim, he is cooking. Indeed, appearance constructions tend to be more appropriate in contexts where the evidence for the embedded claim is somewhat indirect or inferential; in this respect, appearance verbs are similar to epistemic must (Chapman et al. 2015; von Fintel and Gillies 2010).
Of course, it is odd to challenge a speaker about what they heard, given that there is often a presumption that they would be better informed about this than their interlocutor. But this kind of oddness does not call for any special linguistic explanation. (Though compare Korotkova 2016a.)
Various accounts of speaker-orientation and non-challengeability have been proposed in the evidential literature; see, e.g., Korotkova (2016b) and references therein. The account in Faller (2002) that takes evidential requirements to be sincerity conditions on speech acts, bears some similarity with the account of the acquaintance inferences given in Sect. 3.
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Acknowledgements
This paper grows out of work that appears in Rudolph (2019a, 2019c), as well as my dissertation. Thanks are due to the many people who have provided feedback and discussed these ideas with me since at least 2017, especially Chris Kennedy, Arc Kocurek, John MacFarlane, Line Mikkelsen, Patrick Muñoz, Malte Willer and Seth Yalcin. I wish to thank my colleagues at Auburn University, as well as audience members at the Expressing Evidence conference at the University of Konstanz, who heard early versions of parts this work in 2019. For their help on this manuscript, I am grateful to Melissa Fusco and Arc Kocurek. Comments and advice from two anonymous referees for this journal, as well as Regine Eckardt, also greatly helped me clarify and improve this work.
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Rudolph, R.E. Acquaintance and evidence in appearance language. Linguist and Philos 46, 1–29 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-022-09354-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-022-09354-1