German erst — a temporal addition to the ‘exclusive muddle’

Abstract

In ‘Principles of the Exclusive Muddle’, Coppock  and Beaver (2014) suggest a scalar common core meaning for a plethora of exclusive particles in English, suggesting that the particles differ in (i) their semantic type, (ii) the kind of scale the focus alternatives are ranked on, and (iii) the constraints placed on the QUD. This paper contributes to this discussion by proposing an analysis of the temporal exclusive erst (‘not until’) in German, based on the same core meaning.