Open Access

Olena Andrushenko

• The study deals with an exclusive adverb only functioning as a part of the NP in Early Modern English based on the Corpus of Early English Books Online. The research takes into account the peculiar features of the XV-XVI-century English word-order and the NPs structure that have been more rigidly defined in terms of syntax compared to the previous centuries. The patterns under analysisfall into such types: [only [NOUN]], [only [PREP] [NOUN]], [[NOUN] only]. The tokens retrieved from the Corpus are tagged following the theory of Discourse Representation Structure. Thus, two major layers have been distinguished, viz. discourse given-new information, as well as, Focus and Topic of the sentence. The investigation found that positional variations of adverb only are used as a mechanism of marking a peculiar type of Focus (informational, identificational, emphatic, contrastive, exhaustive and verum) and are governed by the position of adverb with regard to the word it modifies.