9: Only: Meaning and lmplicatures
In: Questions in Dynamic SemanticsSearch for other papers by Robert van Rooij in
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Abstract
This chapter argues that there is a way to approach the meaning of 'only' that can deal with some of its well-known challenges but still is faithful to classical ideas. It starts discussion by introducing the traditional and predominant view on the meaning of 'only'. Intuitively, it seems to be quite clear what 'only' contributes to the meaning of a sentence. Countless proposals on how to capture this intuition have been brought forward since the nineteen-sixties. One of the most influential is a focus alternative approach. The chapter provides a minimal model analysis of the semantic part, based on Groenendijk & Stokhof's (1984) rule of exhaustive interpretation. It is shown that the resulting analysis makes some appealing predictions, especially if a notion of 'relevance· is taken into account. Finally, the authors argued that the pragmatic inference from 'Only' should be thought of as a conversational implicature.