DP-internal only in English and Russian
My undergraduate thesis in linguistics at Haverford College, December 2018. The final PDF version of the thesis can be found at pdf/thesis.pdf.
Abstract
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.