AMONG nonnative English speakers, easily the most movable and most easily misplaced modifier is the word "only." In any of its three roles as adjective, adverb, or conjunction, "only" can flit effortlessly from place to place, creating as many meanings as the number of positions it perches upon in the sentence. It is, in a word, the ultimate floating quantifier, either intensifying or diminishing the semantic degree of the nouns or verbs it modifies, at times neatly linking one clause to another of its kind, but in the process baffling linguists and students of the language for the last 200 years.
Consider, for instance, the different meanings the word "only" creates by virtue of the five positions it takes in the following sentences:
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