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

8 Only and the Dynamics of Vertical Inference
seems crazy to me ... I just have a very hard time with Horn's theory about the truthconditions
oil love only you.
Further, Adas denies that only NP subjects are monotone decreasing (or
downward entailing), given the lack of any valid inference from (14a) to (14b).
(14) a. Only Socrates entered the race.
b. Only Socrates entered the race early.
This observation actually dates back seven centuries to Peter of Spain, who
notes (in the Tractatus Syncategoremata, Mullally 1945: 33) that no entailment
goes through either way in (14):
(14') a. y- Only Aristotle moves.-*\
b. ^»-Only Aristotle runs. -^
But Peter didn't have polarity or inversion to worry about. How does Atlas
account for the downward or negative effects associated with only NP The
suspension facts he disputes, along with the putative compositionality of only if.
The inversion facts he does not acknowledge. And as for polarity licensing,
Atlas maintains on the basis of the contrast between (15a) and the more
marginal or unacceptable (15b-d)
(15) a. Only John ever suspected David Alexander.
b. *Only Bill wants Sam to finish the report until Friday.
c. "Only Phil will give Lucy a red cent.
d. Only I was all that keen to go to the party.
that—contrast to popular opinion, including that of virtually everyone who has
considered the issue, from Klima 11 to, amazingly, both Ladusaw and
Linebarger—only NP does not in fact license NPIs:
I do not find the syntactic observation that only triggers Negative Polarity Items sufficiently
well-grounded, and so I do not believe that there is yet sufficient ground to take only to be a
negative lexical item. (Atlas 1993: 31 3)
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In fact, though, popular opinion is correct, as the data in (16) show.
(16) a. (Of all her friends,) Only Phil would lift a finger to help Lucy.
b. Only your wife gives a hoot about what happens to you.
(McCawley 1981: 83)
c. My nose and my lungs are only alive at all because they are part of my
body and share its common life.
(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, cited injacobsson 1951)
Only NP is indeed a polarity licenser, although as a non-overt negator and a
non-anti-additive quantifier in the sense of Zwarts (1986) and van der Wouden
(1994), not every polarity item will freely occur within its scope. In this respect,