A V-Raising Approach to the Focus Projection of the Operator –Man Only’

This paper is concerned with the focus projection of man ‘only’. First of all, this paper generalizes that focus projection takes place when -man is the sister of a constituent that is adjacent to V. Second, I claim that the generalization follows if we provide a V-raising/-man-lowering approach: that is, focus projection takes place when man ‘only’ takes vP as its complement and lowers onto the closest constituent after V-to-T raising takes place. This claim amounts to saying that sentential negation and sentential focus are generated in the same way. It will be shown that this proposal provides a principled account of the focus projection of the contrastive marker -nun as well as that of -man.