Distribution of Some/Any and Attitude toward a Proposition

Distribution of Some/Any and Attitude toward a Proposition

  The sentences with some are interpreted differently from the ones with any. Interestingly, however, some and any, just like an R-expression and its corresponding pronoun, may undergo a vehicle change: some in the antecedent vP may be changed into any in the elided vP, and vice versa. In an attempt to resolve this conflict, in this paper I claim that the LF-interpretable features of some and any are identical, and they differ only in terms of an uninterpretable feature, which leads to the distributional differences and the differences in interpretation between the sentences with some and the ones with any. I propose some has an uninterpretable [+positive] feature and any has an uninterpretable [-positive] feature, and they are licensed when the uninterpretable features are checked off by the closest complementizer or proposition-taking operator, which has a [±positive] feature. To summarize the main claims made in this paper, the puzzles centering around the denotation of some and any and their distribution can be explained by the following two claims: (ⅰ) the pairs like some-any have the same LF-interpretable features, but (ⅱ) they have an opposite uninterpretable feature with regard to propositional attitude.