Semantics reading group, 4/1 – Liz Smeets and Michael Wagner

Liz Smeets and Michael Wagner will present their project on the syntax of Only in Dutch and German. We use evidence from scope reconstruction to argue that focus-sensitive operators like only can form a constituent with a focus constituent. In addition, we present a two-place syntactic analysis of Only to capture the attested readings of sentences with Only. We would like to discuss this analysis with other people in the department as we would like to receive feedback on a compositional problem that our analysis may have.