Abstract
In this paper, Universal any and Negative Polarity Item any are uniformly analyzed as ‘counterfactual’ donkey sentences (in disguise). Their difference in meaning is reduced here to the distinction between strong and weak readings of donkey sentences. It is shown that this explains the universal and existential character of Universal- and NPI-any, respectively, and the positive and negative contexts in which they are licensed. Our uniform analysis extends to the use of any in command and permission sentences. It predicts that whereas the use of any in permission sentences is licensed and gives rise to a universal reading, it is not licensed in command sentences.
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Acknowledgments
This paper was presented in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, and I would like to thank the audiences of these talks and the reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Van Rooij (2006b) is an early version of this paper.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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van Rooij, R. Towards a uniform analysis of any . Nat Lang Semantics 16, 297–315 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-008-9035-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-008-9035-1