The Biggest Little Word

Abstract

After cataloguing various ‘improper’ sense of only, those which are taken with restricted scope (‘no more than [within a fixed domain]’) as opposed to the purely exclusive ‘proper’ sense, Ockham (1980:137) remarks that These are the senses, then, in which the exclusive expression can be taken improperly. And perhaps there are still other senses in which it can be taken improperly. But since they are not as widely used as the ones we have dealt with, I will leave them to the specialists. Larry Horn: “A glorious picture indeed: monasteries crammed to the spires with specialists on only, laboring away on the fine points of the semantics of exclusive propositions. Those were the days!” (Horn 1996: 26-27).

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Kai von Fintel
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Citations of this work

What is a truth-value gap?James R. Shaw - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (6):503-534.
The restrictor view, without covert modals.Ivano Ciardelli - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (2):293-320.

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