The Importance of Being ‘Only’: Testing the Neo-Gricean Versus Neo-Entailment Paradigms

Abstract

In Atlas the A. proposed a novel account of the logical form of statements having the form 'Only a is F' and the form 'Also a is F', an analysis of the entailments and of the implicatures of those statements, and a discussion of the effects of focal stress on implicatures. In this paper the A. discusses the merits of his account over those of a Gricean account. In doing so he discusses several fundamental problems in Gricean Pragmatics: the nature of the cancellation of implicatures, the intrusion into truth-conditions of pragmatic inference, Negative polarity Items, and the non-monotonicity of 'only a' as a Generalized Quantifier