122 Modern English Only and If Only
b. As Buffy moved on, she had an image of her mother, waiting up like she
was on a date or something. If only! (1999 Gilman and Sherman, Visitors
[COCA])
c. As for Jordan, he promised to put his “imprints and footprints” all over the
Wizards. # If only. (2001 Houston Chronicle [COCA])
4.5 Conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued that the development of only from free adverb
focusing adverb > conjunction with an ‘adversative’ sense (as in She wants
to go, only she hasn’t enough money ) represents a relatively straightforward
grammaticalization path involving decategorialization (from numeral to
adjective/ adverb to conjunction), syntactic fi xation (to pre- or initial posi-
tion), development of textual and interpersonal functions, and a restriction but
then opening up of syntactic scope. Only also undergoes semantic– pragmatic
expansion: A focusing adverb denotes rejection of a presupposition of the
focused item (Nevalainen 1991 ), while in its conjunctive function, only
rejects a presupposition of the previous clause. The ‘adversative’ conjunc-
tive use of only is likely to have arisen in contexts of fronting and imperative
sentences in which the status of only can be seen as indeterminate between
focusing adverb and conjunction (i.e., bridging contexts). Conjunctive uses
of only in this ‘adversative’ sense can be dated to the Early Modern English
period.
A slightly different use of only as a conjunction expressing an ‘exceptive’
sense (as in He would be agreeable, only he is very melancholy ) – meaning
‘except that’ or ‘were it not the case that’ – developed in the late eighteenth/
early nineteenth century. The source of this usage would appear to be construc-
tions with but/ except/ save only (that) in modal contexts where only originally
functioned as an intensifi er; later it came to acquire the ‘exceptive’ sense of
but , except , or save , making these forms expendable.
Conjunctive uses of only (in both the ‘adversative’ and ‘exceptive’ senses)
bear strong similarities to pragmatic markers. In the broadest sense, like prag-
matic markers in general, conjunctive uses of only continue to evoke the criti-
cism of prescriptivists as “non- standard” or “colloquial.” But more specifi cally,
conjunctive only resembles a pragmatic marker in what Halliday and Hasan
( 1976 ) call the “internal function” of conjunctions. In the case of adversative
conjunctions, the “internal” meaning is ‘in spite of the roles we are playing,
the state of the argument’; we can see this meaning in uses of conjunctive only
such as I don’t know anything, only he hasn’t any folks and he’s poor. Other
scholars have seen this use as “metalinguistic.”