… but this does rather undermine my explanation.

It should, in principle, work for plurals…

Whereas ‘The only tailor spied’ gets evaluated against {‘Allein is a tailor, and a tailor spied’, ‘Haydon is a tailor, and a tailor spied’, …}.

Roughly, ‘only’ grabs a focus element in its scope, and constructs an alternative set on that element, against which the sentence is evaluated.

So, e.g., ‘Only the tailor spied’ might be evaluated against the set {‘The tailor spied’, ‘ The tinker spied’, ‘The soldier spied’}.

Totally not the point, I know, and I haven’t thought about ‘only’ for … to long to comfortably think about, but:

*Is* there a semantic (or pragmatic) difference? On something like Ippolito’s implicature account, the difference will just arise from the scope of the ‘only’.

Such a great, great movie.

Everyone involved in the publication and promotion of this book should be embarrassed. It's not a "harsh truth" that COVID mitigation was a mistake, it's ghoulish and false.

Oh, long-tailed grackles are fabulous! One of the very (very) few things I miss about Houston.

The thing to remember about Yglesias is that he majored in Philosophy, a field that prizes careful thinking and rigorous argument.

And his advisor told him he wasn’t cut out for it.

Hell, why not Sherman?