Predicates of personal taste and acquaintance requirement: arguments for a unified analysis

Abstract

This squib examines whether predicates of personal taste (PPTs), such as gostoso ('tasty') and divertido ('fun'), should be grouped with aesthetic, moral, and epistemic adjectives within a single class of “subjective adjectives”. The main challenge to this unification is the so-called “acquaintance requirement,” the inference that the speaker must have had direct contact with the entity being described, commonly associated with PPTs. Based on data from Brazilian Portuguese (BP) across different syntactic and semantic contexts, we argue that this inference has more to do with linguistic structure than with the adjective itself. We show that PPTs and other subjective adjectives display similar syntactic-semantic behavior in BP, supporting their inclusion in a unified category. This analysis contributes to semantic studies on subjectivity by offering a more integrated account of the phenomenon.