The use of any with factive predicates such as 'regret' that imply the truth of their complement

What is it about?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usage of any in veridical factive contexts. The empirical questions addressed are whether epistemic factives (e.g. 'to know') licence any to the same degree as emotive factives do, and whether any is equally at home in positive ('I am glad that we got any feedback') and negative emotive ('I regret that I said anything') environments.

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Why is it important?

Claims made in the literature raise certain empirical questions that we address in this paper. The first of these is whether there really is a difference between negative emotive factives such as regret and positive ones such as be glad with regard to their compatibility with a Polarity Sensitive Item such as any. The second empirical point is whether any really is incompatible with non-emotive epistemic factives such as be aware and realize, as Giannakidou (2006: 577, 595) claims. These empirical issues have led us to undertake a systematic large-scale corpus investigation of PSI any licensed by factive predicates – the first such investigation to be carried out.