ONLY: An NPI-licenser and NPI-unlicenser

It is commonly argued that weak negative polarity items (NPIs) (e.g., any) can occur in any (Strawson) downward-entailing environment. This generalization, however, is challenged byWagner’s (2006) observations with the NPI-licenser only: although an only-clause is (Strawson) downward-entailing in its unfocused part, NPIs are not necessarily licensed there. In particular, DPonly does not license an NPI that appears within the unfocused part of its left argument (as seen in *Only a chair of any HUMANITIESF department met with the president), and VP-only does not license an NPI if this NPI and the focused item appear within the same island (as seen in *The president only met with a chair of any HUMANITIESF department). These observations suggest that the licensing status of an NPI in an only-sentence is not just determined by the polarity pattern of the environment where this NPI gets interpreted. To explain Wagner’s (2006) observations, I argue that only is not just an NPI-licenser but also an “NPI-unlicenser.” Following Chierchia (2006, 2013), I assume that an NPI carries a domain feature [D] which activates domain alternatives, and that an NPI is unlicensed if exhaustifying its domain alternatives yields a contradiction. I further propose that only can check off the [D] feature of an NPI that appears within its syntactic argument. If the argument of only is downwardentailing with respect to an NPI, using only to check off the [D] feature of this NPI would return an inference that contradicts the prejacent presupposition and make this NPI unlicensed. In the case of VP-only association, if an NPI is not focused and doesn’t appear within a focus-contained island, the contradiction can be avoided by F-movement.