...-less in Wonderland? - Revisiting Any

Ladusaw (1979), Carlson (1980), and Linebarger (1987) have all argued that negative-polarity any is an existential quantifier that surfaces in certain environments, notably in the scope of negation. Similarly, Kadmon & Landman (1993) interpret it as an indefinite with existential force. On these analyses (1b) is the correct LF. I will refer to these diverse accounts collectively as the ∃-account. They are opposed to the earlier ∀-account proposed by Quine (1960) and Lasnik (1972), which takes the underlying semantics of (1a) to be (1c). An attractive feature of the ∀-account, and one very much on the minds of its early proponents, is that it may allow the negative-polarity item any (NPI any) to be accommodated to so-called “free-choice any” (FC any). FC any is uncontroversially some sort of universal quantifier, with a distribution as fussy as that of NPI any . If the two are really the same lexeme acting in the same way, then (2a) and (2b) are parallel sentences: any serves in each as a wide-scope universal. (3) is similar.