Only ‘only’ only: A distributed meaning approach to exclusive doubling

Abstract

Cross-linguistically, exclusive particles ‘only’ may be doubled with a single focus association, giving rise to an apparent form-meaning mismatch. Focusing on an understudied case of doubling of exclusive adverbial particle zinghai and sentence-final particle (SFP) zaa3 in Cantonese, this study refines the operator-particle approach (e.g., Quek & Hirsch 2017) and argues for a novel view where exclusive doubling instantiates a scalar focus structure. I demonstrate that both particles have focus-sensitive contributions: zinghai encodes at-issue exclusivity and zaa3 encodes not-at-issue scalar meaning. I further propose that zaa3 is semantically dependent on zinghai, and acquires access to the lower alternative set quantified by zinghai via co-indexation of Roothian C_i (Rooth 1992). This view not only implicates that there is more than one way to access lower alternatives across another focus operator (cf. Bade & Sachs 2019; Erlewine 2024), but it also offers a possible answer to why languages allow exclusive focus particles to be doubled.