Exclusive Company: Only and the Dynamics of Vertical Inference ...

18 Only and the Dynamics of Vertical Inference
(43) a. Only WHEN I'M DEPRESSED do I ever eat any meat.
b. *Only when I'm EVER DEPRESSED ABOUT ANYTHING do I eat meat.
(44) a. He only bothered to write WHEN HE NEEDED MONEY.
a'. *He only BOTHERED TO WRITE, [i.e. he never called]
a". Only WHEN HE NEEDED MONEY did he bother to write.
b. You only lift a finger to help WHEN YOU WANT SOMETHING.
b'. *You only LIFT A FINGER TO HELP.
b". Only WHEN YOU WANT SOMETHING do you lift a finger to help.
(45) a. The only one who said a word was CHRIS.
b. # Chris only SAID A WORD (literal only; no'NPI idiom'reading)
The contexts in which NPIs are acceptable do indeed license downward
inferences in the Burley-Ladusaw sense—if we ignore existential import. 24
Thus if I eat meat only when I'm depressed, then it follows that in particular I
eat pork (if I eat it at all) only when I'm depressed, but not that I eat meat only
when I'm depressed about linguistics.
Crucially, the argument of only that corresponds to the restrictor of a universal
is a downward, superior-to-inferior-inference licensing, and NPIfriendly
environment, regardless of its syntactic position. 25 And regardless of its
morphology as well; thus, in (46b), where A is a singleton set, the relevant B
position surfaces not as a standard restrictor-of-universal but is instead
introduced by the determiner the only, which semantically amounts to the
converse of adverbial only:
(46) a. Only As are Bs ~ All Bs are As
b. Only A (Bs/is a B) ~ The only {B/B'er} is A
As expected, NPIs are licenced in this context, but not just any NPI. 26
In the context of (47), we find pronominal all and the only thing occurring
interchangeably as heads of an NPI-hosting relative clause. 27
(47) a. The only thing he ever does anymore is complain,
b. All he ever does anymore is complain.
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According to the line pursued here, the relation between an only predication
and its prejacent—treated variously over the centuries as an entailment, a
presupposition, a conventional or conversational implicature, and a Geachian
ghost—is reconstructed as an indirect deduction from an existential premise.
The linguistic correlates of downward entailment can be attributed to the
convertibility of only predications and the corresponding universals, each
downward-inferential in the corresponding (restrictor) argument.
But while conversion is always possible, the strongest case for only phrases
defining strict downward inferential patterns are those where only takes
common noun or adverbial focus. De Mey (1991: 102-4) points to the crucial