A distributed syntax for evaluative ‘only’ sentences

I claim in this article that several operators in different positions interact to yield the meaning of a nur sentence in German which may receive an evaluative interpretation such as Paul aß nur Kekse ʻPaul only ate cookies (and the speaker considers this little and/or bad)ʼ. The exclusive component of meaning comes from an adverbial particle as in the standard account. For the evaluative component of meaning which is present in many nur sentences, I assume an interplay of C/I domain evaluative categories and an operator in adfocus position. Evidence for the interplay of these operators comes from contexts in German and Dutch in which both the exclusive and the ad-focus operator are pronounced, from topicalization and extraposition data, from subordinate clauses with an impoverished C domain, from a newspaper corpus search and from a blocking effect induced by negation.