What Does Only Assert and Entail?

This paper investigates the semantics of English only and two equivalent expressions in Japanese -dake and -shika, giving attention to two aspects: (i) the debate over the status of two propositions that are involved in the use of ONLY expressions and (ii) the semantic and pragmatic differences among ONLY items, if any. We claim that a sentence with ONLY expressions entails both the affirmative and negative propositions. This view raises issues with Horn's original claim (1969) as well as van Rooij and Schulz's (2005) while supporting Atlas (1991, 1993) and Horn (2002). We claim then that the difference in strength between the affirmative and negative propositions emerges from what is asserted by that sentence. One of the bases for our claim is that there is a significant difference in behavior between entailment and assertion of a given sentence, following Horn (2002). This difference explains the difference between -dake on the one hand and -shika and -only on the other: -dake differs from only and -shika in that it asserts the affirmative proposition while -shika and only asserts the negative proposition.