Robert van Rooy & Katrin Schulz. “Only: Meaning and implicature”, manuscript to appear in a collection on questions and answers edited by Paul Dekker et al. A very short version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 2004

The issue of how to account for the interpretation of ‘only’ has always been exciting and challenging. Over the years many sophisticated proposals have been brought forward, but ‘only’ always managed to strike back by exposing another new and strange property. In this paper we will not focus on new extraordinary data and their treatment. Instead, we will argue that there is a way to approach the meaning of ‘only’ that is faithful to classical insights and observations but still can deal with well-known challenges.