the syntax of only

reflection of learner competence

meaning

literature review

part of speech/ word class/ word categories of only

grammatical competence ⭐ native speaker, internalised, able to judge grammaticality with intuition

focus

possible positions/distribution/distributional properties in sentences

emphasis

scope; the scope "only" command in the sentence,

toner

perception/competence ⭐ non-native speaker, second/foreign language

Taiwan L1 Mandarin Chinese ESL/EFL learners' perception of "only", understanding, perceive, conceive, judgment of acceptability, comprehend, interpret

years of learning English, when did they start

age

education level, major

lived in English speaking countries background

English proficiency tests

any native speaker teachers?

get native speaker judgment

syntactic priming

ambiguity : different ways to draw the syntactic tree

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subtle nuances

draw syntactic trees to map out the phrase structure

get samples from corpus

constitutional tests

The Syntactic Phenomena of English Volume 1 James D. McCawley

unacceptable, stigmata, anomalous, deviant

p. 8, Chapter 1. "Only bears a focus

only is a focus particle, exclusive operator, scope, restrictive text

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presupposition, prepositional analysis

grammaticality judgement

SIL Linguistics Glossary Terms https://glossary.sil.org/

marker

focus

metalingual

particle

focus particle

constituent

signal

operation

immediate constituent

ultimate constituent

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questionnaire on google form, send link to targets: prosodic element lacking, focus is not expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "xx the word" which prime and identify xx as the only person / action happened. Written, focus is highlighted syntactically by placing the focus particle "only" preceding the verb/noun focus. The accented word(s) forms the focus domain.

when only is placed at the end of a sentence. who where does it command?

test: if we do not addign focus marker, but prepose hte focus to hlightlight it
john i saw, john was the person i saw, I saw john, Sam I am, I am Sam

prominence

focus is associated with the focus sensitive expression only. class of focus sensitive expressions in which focus can be associated with includes exclusives (only, just) **replacement test other focus expressions) non-scalar additives(merely, too) scalar additives( also, even) particularlzersm ... focus operators must c-command their focus.