4/12 conf=?UTF-8?Q?=C3=A9rence_?=Edward Garrett

[Alda MARI]

Chers collègues, 
 
voici un rappel pour la conférence de demain, 
 
Edward Garrett (SOAS, University of London)
"A Kantian Perspective on Predicates of Personal Taste"
 
14h30, Institut Jean Nicod
29, rue d'Ulm
Pavillon Jardin, salle de réunion rdc. 
 



vous êtes tous les bienvenus. 


Cordialement, 
Alda Mari

résumé

The literature on philosophical aesthetics arising from and reflecting on Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment has emphasized certain themes in the investigation of taste that have played a mostly minor role in semantic work. This paper is structured around three broad contributions that a roughly Kantian approach to taste can make to linguistics, concerning (1) the nature of aesthetic judgment and its linguistic encoding, (2) the universality of judgments of taste, and (3) the ‘scope’ of taste phenomena.

There are, in principle, a number of ways to explore these three contributions. In this paper, I draw substantially for linguistic support on data from Standard Tibetan. This decision is motivated by a grammatical feature that makes Tibetan an especially useful language to examine in this context: Tibetan routinely marks expressions of personal taste through the use of evidentials, simplifying the diagnosis of PPTs in this language.

An examination of the behavior of PPTs in Tibetan sheds light on each of these three contributions. First, certain otherwise unaccounted for evidential distributions, relating to the availability of specific evidential shifts and inference patterns, begin to make sense when sentences with Tibetan PPTs are analysed as expressing aesthetic judgments in the Kantian sense. Second, the ubiquity of the direct evidential tag construction, used with PPTs to converge upon a common characterization of shared space, evidences the normative or coercive element of judgments of taste in Tibetan. Third and finally, small-scale corpus research reveals that a range of adjectival predicates can be categorised as PPTs, extending well beyond the usual suspects.

Most of the Tibetan data in this paper comes from audio or video recordings made by the Tibetan & Himalayan Library (THL) in the early 2000s. THL’s entire audio-visual corpus is available online. Many of its recordings have been transcribed into Tibetan, and some also have been translated into English or Chinese. Many of these recordings have been timecoded and can be viewed online using an interactive media player.

This paper therefore aims to establish points of connection between three distinct literatures: first, work on the semantics of PPTs; second, work in philosophical aesthetics arising from and reflecting on Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment; and third, work on the semantics and pragmatics of Tibetan evidentials. These elements will be blended together in an attempt to advance our understanding of PPTs.


 
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