A Corpus Based Study Of ONLY

Only is an interesting word with high frequency of occurrences in both written and spoken English. Many linguists have devoted their study of only in different aspects. This paper, however, is based on the study of samples from different existing popular corpora. The study is intended to take a different perspective compared to traditional study in order to reveal the real uses of only by analyzing its distribution and characteristics appearing in the different corpora. The first chapter of the paper introduces the significance of study and the main studying methods used in the paper. Problems raised up by other linguists are also listed to explain the author's attitude towards the problems. The second chapter introduces three main corpora used in the paper: BNC, MICASE, and Time. In the third part of the paper, the focus of study lies in the uses of only in spoken and written English. The data obtained from the corpora are compared and calculated to demonstrate the different distribution of only in different corpora. The result turns out to be that only appears more frequently in the form of adjective in spoken corpus and likewise appears more frequently in the form of adverb in written corpus. The fourth part of the paper is intended to reveal the relationship between different individual samples by the study of syntax. The attribute of adverb only and placement of only are studied on individual corpus samples by building up the sample's binary tree structure. The theory of syntax used in this paper is based on the most modern transformational grammar: Minimalist. The study shows that only can almost appear everywhere in a sentence. The last part of the paper is about the study of ambiguity. As ambiguity is such a complex linguistic phenomenon, the writer just raises up the personal preposition and suggestion on this problem. The writer suggests that certain syntax structures are related with ambiguous phenomenon. The conclusion of the paper mainly talks about the meaning of the study of this paper to ESL learners and English teaching method.