only: A Case Study In Projective Meaning

I offer an integrated theory of the meaning of only in which the prejacent, while not presupposed, is both entailed and backgrounded, hence tends to project (following a general proposal about projection due to Simons et al. 2010). Moreover, I argue, contra Beaver & Brady (2008), that only is not conventionally associated with focus, the focus effects arising instead pragmatically. But I do adopt aspects of their semantics for only, including the presupposition of a pre-order over the elements of its domain. References Abbott, B. 2000. ‘Presuppositions as non-assertions’. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1419–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00108-3 Abbott, B. 2008. ‘Presuppositions and common ground’. Linguistics and Philosophy 31: 523–538. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9048-8 Amaral, P. 2010. ‘Entailment, assertion, and textual coherence: the case of almost and barely’. Linguistics 48, no. 3: 525–545. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/LING.2010.016 Amaral, P., Roberts, C. & Allyn Smith, E. 2008. ‘Review of The Logic of Conventional Implicature by Chris Potts’. Linguistics and Philosophy 30: 707–749. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9025-2 Atlas, J. D. 1993. ‘The importance of being “only”: testing the neo-Gricean versus neoentailment paradigms’. Journal of Semantics 10: 301–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jos/10.4.301 Beaver, D. 2001. Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA. Beaver, D. 2010. ‘Handout from a talk on projective meaning’. Stuttgart, Germany. Beaver, D. & Brady, C. 2003. ‘Always and Only: Why not all focus sensitive operators are alike’. Natural Language Semantics 11: 323–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1025542629721 Beaver, D. & Brady, C. 2008. Sense and Sensitivity. Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444304176 Beckman, M. E. & Ayers, G. M. 1994. ‘Guidelines for ToBI labeling guide, ver. 2.0’. On-line at The Ohio State University: www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~tobi/. Chierchia, G. & McConnell-Ginet, S. 1990. Meaning and Grammar: An introduction to semantics. MIT Press, Cambridge. Cohen, A. 1999. ‘How Are Alternatives Computed?’ Journal of Semantics 16: 43–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jos/16.1.43 Coppock, E. & Beaver, D. 2010. ‘Mere-ology: Toward a unified analysis of mere and other exclusives’. Slides for a talk at the Workshop on Alternative Semantics, Lund, France. de Swart, H. 1991. Adverbs of quantification: a Generalized Quantifier approach. Ph.D. thesis, University of Groningen. Féry, C. & Samek-Lodovici, V. 2006. ‘Focus projection and prosodic prominence in nested foci’. Language 82