The Meaning of Evaluative Language

Project management: Katharina Felka (Graz) and Nils Franzén (Umeå)

Duration: 01.10.2021 - 31.12.2024

Funded by: Swedish Research Council

Third-party funded project (§§ 26-28 UG) (ongoing)

 

Project description
We often make judgmental claims. We say things like that the treatment of the Rohingya is wretched, that Ocean's 8 is a good movie, that the Sagrada Familia is beautiful and that caviar is delicious. The nature of values such as wretchedness, goodness and beauty has always preoccupied philosophers. Are they part of an objective, mind-independent reality or are they more subjective in nature? One aspect of this question concerns the nature of evaluative discourse. When we make moral - and more generally, evaluative - statements, are we trying to represent an objective reality that is independent of us, or is evaluative discourse subjective in nature? Although this question has been intensively discussed, it is remarkable that little effort has been made to examine it from a linguistic perspective, even though it is ultimately a question about the semantic nature of evaluative discourse. So far, the discussion has mostly focused on extra-linguistic criteria such as ontological parsimony. The overall aim of the project is to close this gap and to evaluate the question of the nature of evaluative discourse from a linguistic perspective.