In English, the adverb only/merely contributes to both the assertion and the presupposition of the sentence in which it occurs (Horn 1969, Klinedinst 2005, van Rooij & Schulz 2007, Beaver & Clark 2008, Roberts 2006, 2011, a.o.). The sentence in (1) presupposes that the janitor is ranked low on some contextually relevant scale (scalarity) and asserts that Maria did not talk to a person of a high...
