Exclusivity, uniqueness, and definiteness

An utterance of (2a) means of course that there is only one author of Waverley – indeed, that is most likely one’s point when one uses (2a). But (2b) can mean that there is strictly more than one author of Waverley, on the reading that can be paraphrased, ‘It’s not the case that only Scott is an author of Waverley’. In (2c) the question may concern the number of authors; if the answer is no, then there are several. Likewise, in (2d), it is supposed in the antecedent that there is only one author, and the sentence is consistent with the falsehood of that supposition, so there might be more. In general, sentences of the form X is F have two readings, a predicative one and an equative one. For example, the predicative reading of (2a) is ‘Only he is an author of Waverley’. The ∗We would like to thank Chris Piñón and an anonymous reviewer for feedback that greatly improved the paper. This research was partially supported by NSF grant BCS-0952862 Semantics and Pragmatics of Projective Meaning across Languages, and by NSF BCS-0904913, DoD HHM402-10-C-0100, and the NYCT TeXIT project.