Vol. 6, Issue 1, Part A (2024)

The proper functions and positions of words in grammar are essential to academic linguistic study. Thus, understanding their functions and positions is necessary to construct a proper discourse. This study analyzed the functions and positions of the word only in the spoken text of Filipino users of English and whether these functions and positions deviate from Standard American English. The corpora used in the study are 278 spoken texts found in the Philippine Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-PHIL). The word only was chosen and analyzed using AntConc 3.5.7. The findings revealed that only functions effectively as both an adverb and an adjective. Likewise, the word only is positioned in various locations within the sentences (i.e., at the beginning of the sentence, between the subject and the main verb, between the transitive verb and the direct object for the adverb, and in front of a noun for adjective), indicating its versatile usage as both an adverb and an adjective across different linguistic contexts. The overall results showed that the positions of only found in the corpora conform to the Standard American English.