The use ofanywith factive predicates

Abstract

AbstractWhile 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 whichanyis found. This paper proposes the first systematic large-scale survey of the use ofanywith factive predicates. Based on corpora totaling nearly 5 billion words, the paper establishes the relative frequency ofanylicensed by the different factive predicates (epistemic factives, as well positive, negative and counterexpectative emotives). Negative emotive factives (e.g.regret) were found to licenseany1.8 times more frequently than counterexpectative factives (be amazed), which licenseany25.8 times more than do positive emotives (be glad). Emotive factives are associated with counterfactual preferences and expectations that make available a negative reading that licensesany. The examination of the data does not support a rescuing analysis that separates these occurrences ofanyfrom other licensed uses. On the contrary, the data show thatanyis 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.).