A distributed syntax for evaluative ‘only’ sentences

Abstract I claim in this article that several operators in different positions interact to yield the meaning of a nur sentence in German which may receive an evaluative interpretation such as Paul aß nur Kekse ʻPaul only ate cookies (and the speaker considers this little and/or bad)ʼ. The exclusive component of meaning comes from an adverbial particle as in the standard account. For the evaluative component of meaning which is present in many nur sentences, I assume an interplay of C/I domain evaluative categories and an operator in ad-focus position. Evidence for the interplay of these operators comes from contexts in German and Dutch in which both the exclusive and the ad-focus operator are pronounced, from topicalization and extraposition data, from subordinate clauses with an impoverished C domain, from a newspaper corpus search and from a blocking effect induced by negation.

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