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Some Reasons Why There Can't Be Any some-any Rule

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Robin Lakoff
Robin Lakoff*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

This paper presents evidence that semantic notions—such as presupposition, speaker’s and hearer’s beliefs about the world, and previous discourse—must be taken into account in a complete treatment of the distribution of some and any in conditional, negative, and interrogative sentences. Syntactic conditions alone will not account for the fact that, in certain sentence types, the two forms occur with different meanings.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 1969, pp. 608 - 615
Copyright
Copyright © 1969 Linguistic Society of America

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References

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