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Can somebody please explain for me the meaning of ばかり in とばかり思って, as far as I can guess through the examples it means something like "そう思ったんだけど、実際に・・・・・・".

  1. 僕たちはずっと、彼らは一生安泰だとばかり思っていたんだけど、君の話によると、見た目より大変だな。
    We always thought they had it made, but from what you say, it's harder than it looks.

  2. 彼はつい最近入った新人だとばかり思っていた。
    I thought of him as being a fairly recent newcomer.

  3. 「いえ、ただ、こちらの晩餐会で振る舞われた料理のことは、皆が絶賛していたものですから。 だからあなたも真剣に取り組んでいるものだとばかりーー」

Well, it's just that, everyone highly prised the food which was on this banquet. And that is why I thought that you're putting all your efforts into it, but--

Incidentally, I found one more sentence with some sort of interesting (at least for me) ばかり usage -「あたしは、形とばかり並べられた陶器のティーセットに手を伸ばす。」, I understand that the meaning would be something like "the teacups was lined up just for show", but what is the point of putting と before ばかり in this case?

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    I recommend visiting this page maggiesensei.com/2013/07/02/%E3%81%B0%E3%81%8B%E3%82%8A-bakari it goes over all the different meanings of ばかり and you were right in guessing that this particular pattern とばかり思って is used when you believe something strongly but turns out to be something else.
    – Ryan
    Mar 9, 2014 at 14:19

1 Answer 1

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You have kind of answered your own first question but I would like to add a few words.

「Aだとばかり思っていた」 means and implies that the speaker made a premature judgement about something to form an impression or opinion that is based only on fragmentary information. Later on, he realized that there was more to the story and had to re-form his opinion.

「Aだとばかり思っていた

is virtually synonymous to:

「Aだとしか思っていなかった

Your example #3 is cool because it shows that the 「思っていた」 part sometimes gets omitted. Verbs such as 「思う」、「言う」、「感じる」 often get omitted, which makes sentences end abruptly with the quotative particle 「と」.

To answer your last question, 「~~とばかり」 is a common phrase used to add emphasis to the ~~ part. The 「と」 is quotative. The speaker is implying that whoever had laid out the tea set would have wanted to say "Form is important." I myself would have added a 「に」 after the 「ばかり」.

See meaning #6 in http://kotobank.jp/word/%E8%A8%B1%E3%82%8A?dic=daijisen&oid=14657800

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