Multiply all of the above by all the possible definitions of “like” and “red” and any context relevant counterfactuals.
For example:
Speaker could have said love instead of Like, so they don’t love red. And every other point on the spectrum.
Like can also mean “am similar to” (not grammatically correct usage here… but that a whole ’nuther can of worms)
Red is a color, but could also be referring to a person (usually one with red hair)
There may be other options, and “I like red” is expressing an ordinal preference among them.
Also, too, maybe the speaker actually said “I, like, read” meaning that they viewed written material in a casual way and derived meaning from it, and it was mis-heard.
Very true. In this particular set of examples, I was holding the specific word meanings as pretty fixed, but in common usage, discrepancies here are a really big deal.
There are really so many things that a simple phrase could mean.
Multiply all of the above by all the possible definitions of “like” and “red” and any context relevant counterfactuals.
For example:
Speaker could have said love instead of Like, so they don’t love red. And every other point on the spectrum.
Like can also mean “am similar to” (not grammatically correct usage here… but that a whole ’nuther can of worms)
Red is a color, but could also be referring to a person (usually one with red hair)
There may be other options, and “I like red” is expressing an ordinal preference among them.
Also, too, maybe the speaker actually said “I, like, read” meaning that they viewed written material in a casual way and derived meaning from it, and it was mis-heard.
Very true. In this particular set of examples, I was holding the specific word meanings as pretty fixed, but in common usage, discrepancies here are a really big deal.
There are really so many things that a simple phrase could mean.