Only: Meaning and implicatures

The issue of how to account for the interpretation of ‘only’ has always been exciting and challenging. Over the years many sophisticated proposals have been brought forward, but ‘only’ always managed to strike back by exposing another new and strange property. In this paper we will argue 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. In section 2 we will start our discussion by introducing the traditional and predominant view on the meaning of ‘only’ – we will call it the focus alternative approach. The main aim of the section will be to argue that this is not the right way to account for the meaning of ‘only’. In section 3 we will then introduce a different approach, proposed by von Stechow (1991) – the background alternatives approach. We will develop a formalization of the latter analysis making use of minimal models and show that there is a close relation between the two contrasting approaches. But even though both approaches share the same driving idea, the background alternatives approach is better capable to deal with the challenges of the meaning of ‘only’. The rest of the paper will support this claim by showing that the approach can account for well-known problems of focus alternative proposals. Of course, we cannot discuss all the puzzles of the meaning of ‘only’ in one paper. We have, therefore, decided to concentrate on two well-known problems that concern pragmatic properties of ‘only’. A closer discussion of the many semantic issues ‘only’ raises has to wait for another occasion. In section 4 we will deal with the question what part of the meaning of ‘only’ belongs to its semantics and what part has to be attributed to pragmatic considerations. The next section deals with the relevance dependence of ‘only’. Finally, in section 6 we will argue that we should account for the inference from ‘Only φ’ to φ as a conversational implicature. This part strongly builds on a proposal made in van Rooij & Schulz (2004). We will see that this Gricean explanation allows us