Analyzing English "Only" as "Not Any More/Other Than"
Linmin Zhang
May 2024 

I adopt a decompositional view on "only", proposing that it contains three elements: (i) negation, (ii) an additive part (e.g., like "more" or "other"), and (iii) an NPI. Thus "only" essentially means anti-additivity and can be paraphrased as "not any more/other (than)". For an "only" sentence like "(not) only Mary came", our intuition is that "Mary came" naturally follows. I argue that this positive inference is an implicature in a positive "only" sentence (e.g., "not anyone other than Mary came") but entailed meaning in a negative "only" sentence (e.g., "someone other than Mary came").

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008130 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Slides for the ELSJ 17th International Spring Forum 2024
keywords:	only, (anti-)additivity, implicature, npi licensing, semantics
previous versions:	v2 [May 2024] v1 [May 2024]
Downloaded:	550 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]