The concessive use of "if only"

• Autores: María José Luzón Marco
• Localización: ES: Revista de filología inglesa, ISSN 0210-9689, Nº. 21, 1998, págs. 225-234
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The use of large corpora reveals the typical or habitual contexts where an item occurs and enables accurate descriptions of the discourse and pragmatic function of lexical and grammar items. This paper reports a corpus-driven study of the concessive use of if only in discourse. if only is a grammar construction which allows the user to choose between a set of alternatives which the previous text leaves unspecified. This construction is used to express so me kind of restriction or specification of elements in the previous text. This paper provides a clear example of how corpus analysis can be used to describe the pragmatic and discourse function associated with an idiomatic grammatical expression.