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Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on September 12, 2007
Journal of Semantics 2008 25(1):45-91; doi:10.1093/jos/ffm010
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

On the Meaning of Only

Michela Ippolito

University of Toronto

Correspondence: MICHELA IPPOLITO, Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto 130 st. George Street, Toronto, ONTARIO M5S 3H1, e-mail: michela.ippolito{at}utoronto.ca


  Abstract

This paper investigates the semantics of the focus particle only and is primarily concerned with the relation between the exclusive proposition and the proposition expressed by the prejacent (the only-less sentence). We argue that, in a sentence of the form only A is B, only triggers the conditional presupposition that if something is B, A is B. We show that in a positive-only sentence, the prejacent is a conversational implicature and therefore it is cancellable. Instead, in a negative-only sentence the prejacent is shown to be entailed by any context that satisfies the conditional presupposition and to which the (negative) assertion is added. Hence, the prejacent of a negative-only sentence is not cancellable. The entailment analyses, the strong presupposition analyses and the weak presupposition analyses of only are discussed, together with the problems that each type of theories faces.

Received for publication 16 May 2006. Revision received 11 February 2007. Accepted for publication 5 April 2007.


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