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

3o Only and the Dynamics of Vertical Inference
promising tool for exploring why only NP
statements, beyond sharing downward
orientation of universal restrictors, appear to
be somehow more 'negative' than the corresponding
all statements, while at the same time
providing a new beachhead for the assault on
the focus-of-on/y licensing problem.
NOTES
1 This paper has had several previous
incarnations since its origin in Horn
(1992: 178-83). I would like to acknowledge
the audiences of these earlier
presentations—at SALT II (Columbus) in
1992, at Rutgers and CUNY in 1993, at
Groningen in 1994, at the LSA (New
Orleans), MIT, and the Ottawa Conference
on Negation in 1995—for their
observations, hints, and objections. I am
especially grateful to Jay Atlas, Barbara
Abbott, Jack Hoeksema, Bill Ladusaw, •
Jim McCawley, Victor Sanchez Valencia,
Kai von Fintel, and the two Journal of
Semantics referees for their generous analytic
and bibliographic suggestions and
complaints. Given the analysis to be presented
herein, I can safely assert that only
the author is responsible for any remaining
defects.
2 I am indebted to Victor Sanchez Valencia
for directing me to many of the medieval
sources cited here and below. The earliest
one either of us has been track down in
the current connection is Abelard (1079-
1142), whose analysis of (i) into the
conjunction in (ii) appears in Tractatus III
(Topica) of his Dialeclica (Abelard 1970:
332-3)-
(i) Socrates tantum est Socrates.
(ii) Socrates est Socrates et nulla alia res
est Socrates.
3 Altmann (1977: 311-17) and Reis (1977:
56-8) note similar suspension effects in
German:
(i) Nur Hans mag Bier, und moglicherweise
nicht einmal er.
'Only Hans wants beer, and possibly
not even he [does]'
(ii) Hans verdient nur 1000—und moglicherweise
sogar noch weniger.
'Hans earns only 1000, and possibly
even less'
4 The facts are actually somewhat more
complex. For many speakers a and only a
sequences do trigger inversion; for some,
they license negative polarity items as
well. Perhaps one relevant factor for the
permissivists is that the syntactically
closer conjunct is the negative one, so that
the semantic non-monotonicity of the
conjoined phrase may be overridden by
the proximity of its negative component
to the diagnostics in question. (The
impossibility of Only XP and XP phrases,
as discussed in Horn 1969, 1991, makes
this hypothesis difficult to test.) If this line
is correct, inversion in contexts like that
of ($"b) is subject to an effect parallel to
the role of the Closest Conjunct Principle
(see Morgan 1972) in determining
number agreement in English. It should
be noted that even speakers in the liberal
inversion and polarity dialects distinguish
the suspension and cancellation properties
of the prejacent of only a from that of
the corresponding a and only a sequences.
(See note 9 below for related considerations.)
5 I read Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica
la, q. 31, arts 3,4 in Pegis 1945: 311-
14) as endorsing an asymmetric position
on only, although I confess that with Peter
of Spain, who later became Pope John
XXI, figuring among the conjuncrionalist
host, the presence of a saint on my side of
the ledger would provide moral support.
Be that as it may, Peter's analysis did
precede his election to the papacy, thus,
whether or not the conjuncrionalist
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