Reconsideration of Some and Any

概要

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Traditional accounts of some and any are reexamined. First, it is found that those traditional accounts are not necessarily satisfactory. Also, a number of pieces of evidence show some and any do not have a syntactic polarity relation. The following provides supporting evidence for this. Some in non-affirmative clauses is not an idiomatic usage. It is the same as the regular some in affirmative clauses. Any occurring with singular count nouns provides good evidence that this type of any is not a quantifier, and that it has no polarity relation to some. Any used in a negative clause expresses a total denial of quantity of the noun modified. This total denial of quantity also shows that any is not a polarity opposite of some. Seemingly, the unspecified quantitative sense of some is applied to any with a plural count noun in interrogative or conditional clauses. Even this apparent syntactic polarity relation between any and some is dubious when considering that this type of any clauses has a "zero-or-at-least-a-minimum-number" sense.