The parts of only: effects of mereology in the semantics of only

Abstract

Traditionally, only is thought to negate non-weaker alternatives. Kratzer’s (1989) still life example, presented more than thirty years ago, challenges this purely logical approach to the semantics of only, appearing to show that the constitution of objects matters to what only negates. This paper reexamines Kratzer’s example in the light of later developments in the literature on only. We discuss four types of responses: (i) uphold the traditional view of only supplemented by lexical postulates (van Rooij 2005), (ii) replace entailment in the meaning of only with ‘lumping’, a variant of entailment defined in terms of situation semantics (von Fintel 1997; Bonomi & Casalegno 1993; Kadmon 2001), (iii) adopt an innocent exclusion semantics for only (Fox 2007), (iv) following Kratzer’s (1989) suggestion, appeal to a general no-overlap constraint on counting domains. We show that all approaches but (iv) face empirical challenges. Despite some loose ends, we favour (iv) in the comparison, as it faces no clear empirical challenges, though significant work remains to be done.