This paper explores the distribution of English grammatical devices for highlighting particular constituents restrictively, such as restrictive focusing particles only, just and ALL cleft constructions (e.g. All John did was to read books), and factors controlling it, as exemplified in a body of task-related dialogues and in formal written English. It reveals that the distribution of the devices is more complicated than it has been suggested, particularly in task-related dialogues. Various factors from discourse level ones to syntactic level ones are investigated in both text types. Noteworthy is the existence of a number of discourse level factors, which suggests that this type of the grammatical devices play important roles in discourse organisation.
It has sometimes been suggested that only is used in literary English texts and just in colloquial English. However, this paper shows a more complicated picture regarding these two grammatical devices (and others having the similar syntactic function).