One Day "Only"

A Games in Language Activity

Date
May 10-th, 2002, 9.30h --- 18.00h
Location
Institute for Phonetics
Herengracht 338, Amsterdam
On Friday, May 10, a workshop One Day "Only" is held in Amsterdam. Many people apparently have quite firm and distinct opinions about the meaning and use of the particle "only" and with this informal workshop we would like to bring these views together with new ones.

Program

09.30 Welcome and Coffee
09.45 Only Entailment, Assertion, and Presupposition
11.15 Coffee
11.30 Only Subset, Entailment, Relevance, or Optimality
13.00 Lunch
14.15 Does Only a Non-Conservative Quantifier Associate with Focus?
15.45 Tea
16.00 General Discussion: Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics
17.00 Drinks

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Strategy

Like we did for two previous workshops in Amsterdam on "Questions under Discussion" and "Communication and Attitudes", we have solicited short position statements which serve as the basis for one day of presentation and discussion. In addition, we have posted some essentials of classical papers. (Please inform us about possible omissions!) Participants not from Amsterdam have been asked to present a 15 minute statement.

At the meeting we want to confine ourself to an exchange of opinions about the (written, classical, and presented) statements and a further discussion. We have coordinated the discussion around three themes (cf. below). The three main sessions are chaired by an objective expert. They all start with two oral position statements. The discussion is then cranked up by two (expert or naive, but preferrably subjective) animators. The animators have been asked to reflect upon the stated positions, and mould the issues addressed into a productive discussion. The final discussion is led by the three of us (Alastair, Paul and Henk).

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Sessions

  1. Only Entailment, Assertion, and Presupposition
    • Chair: Martin Stokhof
    • Presentations: Rob van der Sandt and Richard Zuber
    • Animators: Balder ten Cate and Robert van Rooy
    • Statements: many, in particular: Atlas, Atlas and Horn, Geurts and van der Sandt
    • Background (thumbnails): Aquinas, Atlas, McCawley, von Fintel, Geach, Hispanus, Krifka
  2. Only Subset, Entailment, Relevance, or Optimality
    • Chair: Jack Hoeksema
    • Presentations: Petra Hendriks
    • Animators: David Beaver and Ton van der Wouden
    • Statements: some, in particular: Aloni, Butler, Hendriks (Petra), van Rooy, Zeevat, Zuber
    • Background (thumbnails): Bonomi and Casalegno, Cohen
  3. Does Only a Non-Conservative Quantifier Associate with Focus?
    • Chair: Henriette de Swart
    • Presentations: David Beaver and Peter Krause
    • Animators: Helen de Hoop and Jack Hoeksema
    • Statements: most, in particular: Beaver and Clark, Bende-Farkas, Dekker, Hendriks (Herman), Krause, Loebner
    • Background (thumbnails): Carlson, Chierchia, Hajicova et al, Hoeksema and Zwarts, Jaeger, de Mey, Rooth, von Stechow, de Swart
  4. General Discussion: Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics
    • Chair: Alastair Butler, Paul Dekker and Henk Zeevat
    • Presentations: Hans Kamp (to be confirmed)
    • Statements: all
    • Background (thumbnails): all

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Position Statements

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Organization

The workshop One Day "Only" is organized by and is financially supported by

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Candidate Participants

We look forward to seeing you all and to a very nice workshop!

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External Contribution

A note from Diana Archangeli: I can't resist passing this on... Though I'm not a syntactician, a set of sentences involving the word "only" was my first recognition of language as a fascinating object of study. The sentences were:

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