Couple.

[Dennis R. Preston]

larry,

You're right, of course (including the crypticity of the reference). So far
as I remember, she deals only with "weak" ones (and their implications, my
favorites involving spinach eating and spankings, as I recall).

dInIs

 >At 8:23 PM -0500 12/7/00, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>>Everybody please go back and read Robin's why there can't be any some any
>>rule paper.
>>
>>dInIs
>
>I know the paper well, dInIs (it's Robin Lakoff's paper "Some reasons
>why there can't be any some-any rule", published in Language in 1970,
>for those who find the above reference a bit cryptic), but she
>doesn't really address the issues we were just discussing; RL was
>focusing more on cases where both "some" and "any" can occur
>grammatically but where the connotative or implicated meaning
>differs--
>
>Who wants some spinach?
>Who wants any spinach?
>
>To the best of my recollection (I'm away from my LANGUAGE
>collection), she didn't discuss the contrast between "weak" (pure
>existential) and "strong" (partitive) SOME or between weak and strong
>ANY, distinctions which I associate more with Bolinger and, later,
>Milsark (1974).
>
>larry


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736