Expressing Taste in Dialogue

This paper deals with the semantics of taste judgements and the updates they bring about in the dialogue context. Unlike most approaches in formal semantics, we build on empirical work in Conversation Analysis to outline the rudiments of a formal theory that is in line with how taste judgements are used in actual conversation. We propose a model that treats predicates of personal taste such as ‘tasty’ as two-place predicates with an argument for the experiencer that can be generically bound, and combine this model with an Information State Update framework. The resulting system, although still preliminary, is shown to account for the possibility of disagreements over taste and for the fact that different types of constructions are used to perform different types of dialogue acts.