The building blocks of Catalan ‘at least’

This paper deals with the meaning of a Catalan expression that is partially analogous to English at least, namely si més no (literally ‘if more not’). We aim to derive its concessive and epistemic readings, and explain its lack of complete overlap with at least by appealing to si més no’s building blocks: a conditional, an additive morpheme, and negation. Specifically, we argue that ‘si més no φ’ is a biscuit conditional whose consequent contains a VERUM operator. It conveys that if it is not true that there is a ψ such that ψ + φ holds, there is a relevant assertion that it is indeed true that φ. The epistemic and concessive readings are pragmatically derived by appealing to the relevance of the assertion of the consequent under the circumstances described by the antecedent.