The use of any with factive predicates

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.).