A Cognitive Study of the Noun Alternative One from the Perspective of Construction

Abstract

Using the COCA corpus as an auxiliary tool, this paper explores the usage status of Numeral One (1-one) and Anaphoric One (A-one). The results show that although the usage of 1-one and alone is different, the two are closely related. When used as the cardinal number, 1-one, like other cardinal number words, generally refers to the number of a certain kind of countable object, and can be used as a determiner, a quantifier, an adjective or a noun. Once the quantitative meaning of the cardinal word (including 1-one) becomes prominent, its alternative meanings are minimized. When 1-one occurs by itself and there is no noun behind it (e.g., Take ONE), the word is stressed in a sentence. ), and it's hard to tell apart from a-one (e.g., "TAKE ONE"). The only difference is pronunciation -- when "ONE" is stressed, the quantitative meaning becomes more pronounced. The substitution of a-one is not only related to syntactic context, but also to human construal experience. By using the construction family theory to describe all the syntactic contexts in which the English word "one" appears, it is concluded that the syntactic and semantic features of "a-one" are inherited from the usage of "1-one"