Only: Association with focus in event semantics

摘要

We propose an analysis ofonlyin terms of event semantics. This approach allows a unified treatment of a wide range of cases in whichonlyis associated with focused expressions of different categories. Section 1 is devoted to a preliminary discussion of some problems that a good analysis ofonlyshould solve. In section 2 we concentrate on sentences in which the focused expression is a NP. In section 3 we show how our analysis can be extended to other categories. Finally, section 4 contains some remarks on related topics, such as scalarity and exhaustiveness.