Abstrakt
The study deals with means of expressing exclusive meaning in Old English records based on the texts of Helsinki Corpus TEI XML Edition 2011. The aim of the article is to investigate variant expressions in the English records of VII-XI cen. that laid the foundation for Present-Day English (PDE) exclusive focusing adverb only standing. The tokens retrieved from the Corpus are automatically analyzed with the help of #LancsBox which software package has been employed to analyse the data using the following tools from the package: KWIC, GraphColl, Words and Ngrams. Since focusing adverbs are known by their syntactic mobility as well as their interaction with Focus structure of the sentence the article investigates OE exclusive constructions from the perspective of scope and regularities of their positional variation as a result of information-structural effect.
The notion of scope presupposes singling out two positions of the adverb: pre- and post-modification of the element it refers to. The methodology applied relies on c-commanding and phase principle enriched with Question Under Discussion method. The next methodological stage involves tagging of the sentence elements taking into account discourse representation structure. Thus, three major layers have been distinguished, viz. discourse given-new information, as well as, Focus and Topic of the sentence.
As a result of the methods applied it has been proved that the form an(e) (PDE only) though correlating with sentence information structure has little, if any, effect on the arrangement of word-order constituents. Yet, the investigation has found that positional variations of the OE adverb are used as a mechanism of marking a peculiar type information actualization in the discourse, as well as, certain types of sentence Focus (informational, identificational, contrastive and emphatic), which are governed by the focus adverb position in relation to the word it modifies.