{"title":"A distributed analysis of only","authors":"Luka Crnič","doi":"10.1007/s10988-024-09420-w","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The positive, non-exclusive inference of <i>only</i> has been famously elusive with respect to its projective status and its content: in some cases the positive inference behaves like a presupposition, while in others it does not; in some cases the inference is non-modal, corresponding to the prejacent of <i>only</i> or an existential counterpart of it, while in others it is modalized. This behavior, we argue, surfaces the exceptive nature of <i>only</i> (cf. von Fintel and Iatridou in Linguist Inq 38(3):445–483, 2007). More specifically, if the import of <i>only</i> is distributed between a minimality and a subtraction component, as has been argued for exceptives (esp. Gajewski in Nat Lang Semant 16(1):69–110, 2008), the apparently irreconcilable properties of <i>only</i> can be captured.</p>","PeriodicalId":47748,"journal":{"name":"Linguistics and Philosophy","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Linguistics and Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-024-09420-w","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The positive, non-exclusive inference of only has been famously elusive with respect to its projective status and its content: in some cases the positive inference behaves like a presupposition, while in others it does not; in some cases the inference is non-modal, corresponding to the prejacent of only or an existential counterpart of it, while in others it is modalized. This behavior, we argue, surfaces the exceptive nature of only (cf. von Fintel and Iatridou in Linguist Inq 38(3):445–483, 2007). More specifically, if the import of only is distributed between a minimality and a subtraction component, as has been argued for exceptives (esp. Gajewski in Nat Lang Semant 16(1):69–110, 2008), the apparently irreconcilable properties of only can be captured.
期刊介绍:
Linguistics and Philosophy focuses on issues related to structure and meaning in natural language, as addressed in the semantics, philosophy of language, pragmatics and related disciplines, in particular the following areas: philosophical theories of meaning and truth, reference, description, entailment, presupposition, implicatures, context-dependence, and speech actslinguistic theories of semantic interpretation in relation to syntactic structure and prosody, of discourse structure, lexcial semantics and semantic changepsycholinguistic theories of semantic interpretation and issues of the processing and acquisition of natural language, and the relation of semantic interpretation to other cognitive facultiesmathematical and logical properties of natural language and general aspects of computational linguisticsphilosophical questions raised by linguistics as a science: linguistics methodology, properties of linguistic theories and frameworks, and the relation of linguistics to other fields of inquiryContributions may be in the form of articles, replies, or review articles. Linguistics and Philosophy is indexed in the ISI/Social Science Citation Index.