This dissertation is a study in the semantics of exceptive constructions in English. Starting from a detailed discussion of naturally-occurring data, I show that the empirical domain of exceptives is substantially larger than was previously assumed, and that several interpretive properties which are often associated with exception phrases (or EPs) in the literature must be reappraised.

In the dissertation, I challenge some received views on exceptive constructions and argue, on the basis of syntactic and semantic evidence, for the following novel hypotheses: (i) EPs are sanctioned by statements that express generality claims; (ii) EPs do not directly affect the truth of the statements they modify; (iii) there are no exceptive determiners in English; (iv) exceptions are invariably propositional; and (v) EPs are not semantic (i.e. locally compositional) restrictors of quantifier domains. I also advance several new generalizations concerning exceptive constructions and, after reappraising the distribution of EPs in English, provide a semantics for so-called connected and free uses of these phrases.

A central component of the theory developed in the dissertation is the hypothesis that exception sentences express a conjunctive proposition consisting of a generality claim and an exception to that statement. From this theoretical perspective, the licensing condition on EPs is not difficult to formulate: an EP is licensed only by sentences which give rise to the expression of a generalization about a given domain which includes the denotation of the right argument of the exceptive. Since generality claims may be instantiated defeasibly, I argue that EPs are sensitive to defeasible aspects of sentence meaning.