Browsing by Subject "English language -- Grammar, Comparative -- Russian"

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    DP-internal only in English and Russian
    (2019) Fisher, Ian; Huang, Shizhe
    This paper presents an analysis of DP-internal only in English and Russian. I review the evidence in Coppock and Beaver (2012b, 2015) for definites containing only that do not presuppose uniqueness, and supplement it with data from Russian. Building on this empirical foundation, I propose that DP-internal only presupposes existence and asserts uniqueness, and the determiner the in the only constructions is semantically vacuous. As a consequence, DPs containing only, like indefinites, are never of type e. I also present evidence that the DP-internal and adverbial usages of only correspond to a single lexical item.