103c. I didn’t understand drinking, only that the price was unbearable, (2010 The
Antioch Review [COCA])
d. I didn’t know what she meant, only that she thought we were somehow fun-
damentally different (2009 Greenwood, Two rivers [COCA])
Even in its “external sense” only can be understood as a pragmatic
marker since it serves to contradict or reject something which could be
presupposed by or could be assumed to follow from the preceding clause.
According to Nevalainen ( 1991 : 80), only provides a suffi cient condition
for negating the assumed background for an utterance. Thus, in (10), the
second sentence in (a) is possible because not being lazy could be presup-
posed by the fact of being a good student, but in (b) not playing too many
video games does not follow as closely, or necessarily, from being a good
student, and thus only is pragmatically odd; however, in (c) being a good
cook is not related at all to being a good student and hence only is com-
pletely inappropriate:
(10) a. He’s a good student. Only he’s lazy.
b. He’s a good student.? Only he plays too many video games.
c. He’s a good student. * Only he isn’t a good cook.^5
There is sense too in which conjunctive only has a metalinguistic function
characteristic of pragmatic markers. Quirk et al. ( 1985 : 640– 641) argue that
conjunctive forms like only (also rather , incidentally , however , etc.) compare
with “style markers,” in that they incorporate a verb of speaking and the subject
as speaker; hence, in I intended to read the book , only I felt too tired , they sug-
gest, only means ‘I would only say.’ Nevalainen ( 1991 : 51, 81) concurs, calling
the use “metalinguistic.”
The pragmatic use of only can be understood in terms of Relevance Theory
(Sperber and Wilson 1996 ), in which pragmatic markers serve to “constrain the
relevance of the proposition they introduce by indicating that it stands in a par-
ticular relation to the one most recently processed” (Blakemore 1988a : 247);
for example, so in its use as a pragmatic marker (as in There’s $5 in my wal-
let. So I didn’t spend all the money then ) introduces a proposition which is
the contextual implication of the preceding one, and well shifts the relevant
context for interpretation, signifying that the immediately preceding context
is not the most relevant one (Jucker 1993 ). Blakemore ( 1988a : 247) suggests
that the meaning of adversative but is to deny the proposition which is to be
derived from the preceding proposition. A comparable, though perhaps some-
what looser, function is served by adversative only.
5 The asterisk here does not denote an ungrammatical sentence but rather an inappropriate
sequence of sentences from the perspective of discourse coherence.
4.2 Conjunctive Only in PDE