Adverbs of comment and disagreement

Abstract

Adverbs of comment (AOCs) such as sadly raise a question of subjective meaning, much like predicates of personal taste (fun, tasty), namely, to whom the speaker attributes the emotion or evaluation when there is no overt for-PP. I extend Lasersohn's (2005) and Stephenson's (2007) judge analysis for predicates of personal taste to AOCs. My proposal is that disagreement on one and the same proposition sad(p,a) expressed by these adverbs only arises when the hearer correctly resolves the argument of judge a (a constant) despite its absence in overt syntax, i.e. sad(p,a) vs. ¬sad(p,a). Otherwise, only mis- or incomprehension occurs where the speaker and the hearer actually express two different propositions on the same issue, i.e. sad(p,a) vs. ¬sad(p,b). © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.