On Thu, 2 Apr 2020 at 20:45, James Cook via agora-discussion < agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote:
> I don't think I understand your reasoning. To me, the "...included in > a lot in that Auction" is clarifying which set of items the rule is > referring to, i.e. the set of all items in all lots in the auction. I > don't see how it resolves the ambiguity of the word "any". > > I think disambiguating the meaning of "any" often involves common > sense. I'm not sure whether that's what needs to happen here. > > "If I can't afford any item on the menu, I'll find another > restaurant." --- This probably means "If every item on the menu is > unaffordable to me, I'll find another restaurant." > > "If I can't understand any question on the test, I'll ask for a > clarification." --- This probably has the other meaning. > > I don't have a strong opinion, so was just going to go with G.'s > interpretation until Alexis also expressed uncertainty. > > James > Hmm, but "I can't understand any question" definitely means that none of them can be understood. While your second example seems, I agree, to be interpretable by common sense, that's not my first scan of it; my first scan is pretty strongly that it only applies when the speaker cannot understand a single one. The fact that I almost wrote "when the speaker cannot understand any question" implies pretty strongly to me that "any" after a negated verb means "none of them". As contrasted to "If any question cannot be understood", where "any" comes before the negation. (cf the relationship between quantification and negation). -Alexis
