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

1969/09/01 by Robin Lakoff, Robin Tolmach Lakoff
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · Computer Science · #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Natural Language Processing Techniques

paper · doi:10.2307/411442

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.

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