The use of any with factive predicates
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Patrick Duffley
und
Pierre Larrivée
Abstract
While Negative Polarity Items are generally ungrammatical in veridical environments (*I said anything), they are known to be found in factive environments that involve veridicality (I regret you said anything). There is however disagreement in the literature about the types of factive environments in which any is found. This paper proposes the first systematic large-scale survey of the use of any with factive predicates. Based on corpora totaling nearly 5 billion words, the paper establishes the relative frequency of any licensed by the different factive predicates (epistemic factives, as well positive, negative and counterexpectative emotives). Negative emotive factives (e.g. regret) were found to license any 1.8 times more frequently than counterexpectative factives (be amazed), which license any 25.8 times more than do positive emotives (be glad). Emotive factives are associated with counterfactual preferences and expectations that make available a negative reading that licenses any. The examination of the data does not support a rescuing analysis that separates these occurrences of any from other licensed uses. On the contrary, the data show that any is licensed by at-issue meaning, as proposed by (Horn, Laurence. 2016. Licensing NPIs: Some negative (and positive) results. In Pierre Larrivée & Chungmin Lee (eds.), Negation and polarity. Experimental and cognitive perspectives, 281–305. Dordrecht: Springer.).
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Larry Horn, Anastasia Giannakidou, Louis de Saussure, and the audience at the workshop “The pragmatics of grammar: negation and polarity”, held May 19–20, 2015 at the Université de Caen, for their input. What we have done, or not done, with it is our sole responsibility.
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande
- Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English
- Assessing productivity in contact: Italian derivation in Maltese
- Syntactic structures of Mandarin purposives
- External possession of body-part nouns in Dinka
- The use of any with factive predicates
- Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo
- Notice from the Board of Editors
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Diminutives derived from terms for children: Comparative evidence from Southeastern Mande
- Historical shifts with the into-causative construction in American English
- Assessing productivity in contact: Italian derivation in Maltese
- Syntactic structures of Mandarin purposives
- External possession of body-part nouns in Dinka
- The use of any with factive predicates
- Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo
- Notice from the Board of Editors
