The English-Learning and Languages Review Ć HOMEPAGE
The
truth about
some and any,
and
some thoughts it prompted on meanings, grammatical categories, and academic
grammars
Amorey Gethin
This article was first published in English Today 105, Vol. 27, No. 1 (March 2011). It
can be found online at http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=ENG
We are into the second decade of the twenty-first century,
but grammarians still fail to distinguish properly between some and any (and their
compounds – something/anything, etc.).
This may in itself seem a small matter. But it is symptomatic of flaws in the
academic study of language.
General principles
I first discussed the distinction between some and any in Gethin,1990: 87-89, and then some ten years later in much
greater detail in the first version of Gethin 2010a.
The distinction is purely one of
meaning. It has nothing to do with grammatical categories or any sort of
'rule'. If two or more meanings in a sentence are incompatible,
we say it's 'wrong'.
Just as we don't say
1 *I
will go yesterday,
we don't say
2 *There
are any books over there.
The difference in meaning between some
and any is fundamental and crucial. However, this does not mean that
they can never be used as alternatives to each other, in the same way as, for
example, except (for)and apart from. We can say both
3 There are no cats here apart from mine,
and
4 There are no cats here except for mine.
But while we can say
5 There are twenty-six cats here apart
from mine,
we do not say
6 *There are twenty-six cats here except
for mine.
There is always a difference in meaning between apart from and except
(for), whatever the context, as there is between almost all words. In 3 and
4, however, this difference
in meaning makes no practical difference.
And there is no conflict of meaning between except for and the rest of
the sentence in 4. But there is in 6.
The same applies to some and any. We can say
7 Have you got any water? or
8 Have you got some water?
without any significant change in
practical meaning. But while we can say
9 Somebody’s not signed,
we do not say
10 *Anybody’s not signed,
because it is nonsense.
A fundamental mistake grammarians tend to make is
to attach the meaning of the whole to the
part. They may declare, for instance, that some is ‘assertive (positive)’, any ‘non-assertive
(negative)’. They fail to see that it is the basic separate meanings of some
or any, independent of context, that in combination with other
separate meanings sometimes produce whole sentences that can be classified in
this way. Or, to put it another way, ‘assertive’. and ‘non-assertive’ and all
the other analyses they make in connection with some and any are
simply some of the possible results, in 'complete'
meanings, of the use of and combination of various separate meanings. The
result is very often, for instance, that one cannot use some with a
negative, simply because the basic meaning of some will not fit that
particular negative. Very often, however, some not only fits a
particular negative – it is what one has to use with that
negative to express one's meaning, as in example 9. Grammarians also sometimes
make the further basic mistake of failing to recognise, for instance, that
although it may be true that any is
more commonly used in negative sentences, that is only because any + negative situations are more
common in life. But
situations in life, however common, do not make laws of language.
There is a prime example of the
confusion of the meaning of individual words with the meaning of whole
sentences in Quirk et al.’s account
(Quirk et al., 1985) of the definite
article. I have explained their mistakes
in Gethin,1990:77-87, and Gethin, 2010b.
Apart from special uses like the
sooner the better, the has one
simple, basic, unchanging meaning. But Quirk et al. insist on distinguishing many different categories of the: immediate situation; larger
situation; anaphoric reference direct; anaphoric reference indirect; cataphoric
reference; etc., etc., and thereby present the student with a daunting (and
misleading) burden on the memory, while failing completely to convey the essence
of the. There may be complete
sentences that could be classified as ‘anaphoric’, for instance, but such
classification adds nothing to either knowledge or understanding. There is no
such thing as anaphoric the.
The meanings of some and any
What are the meanings of
some and any?
It is impossible to describe properly the meaning of a word with other words.
But for practical purposes I suggest, in their common uses:
Any: its essence is the idea of whatever, whichever you like to think of;
it is an emphatic word, whether in the positive or the negative.
Some is
essentially limited. Some is a certain
unspecified amount of, a certain unspecified portion of, a certain
unspecified number of.
These are necessarily vague and
inaccurate descriptions. Best of all, if you are a teacher, is if you can
demonstrate the meanings to learners physically. With a bit of clownery and ham
acting and some good examples, these descriptions can in fact work quite well.
I have had much exhibitionist fun in the classroom enacting some and any.
Actually, perhaps the simplest way
for non-English-speakers to learn some and
any is by translation in varying
contexts into their native language. This, though, is not to advocate the
translation method of language-learning. Far from it. See Gethin &
Gunnemark, 1996:105-06, where I give advice on using bilingual dictionaries.
Like virtually all words, some
and any can be stressed or unstressed without change in their basic
meaning. Some is pronounced /səm/ when
unstressed, and /sʌm/
when stressed. But some is normally
pronounced /sʌm/ in the phrase some of, whether stressed or unstressed.
Stress
depends on the context and the meaning one wants to convey. For instance, in a sentence like
11 We’ve got some bread but not enough for three people
the position of the
stress depends on the utterance (or context) to which it is a response. If this
was a question such as Do we have
anything to eat? the stress will be on bread,
and some would be unstressed: some bread; but if the question was Have you got any bread?, the stress will
be on some: some
bread.
Similarly:
12 “When shall I come?” “Any time would suit me fine.”
13 “Who can I ask?” “Any doctor should be able to help you.”
Both some and any, stressed or unstressed, can be used in any sort of sentence,
so long as it makes sense.
Some examples of the difference in meaning between the some series and the any series,
and of the interdependence of meanings
14 The doctor hasn't seen anyone. (The doctor has seen no patients
whatever.)
15 The doctor hasn't seen someone. (There is a certain unspecified
person the doctor has not seen, still sitting in the waiting room.)
16 He thinks macaroni grows on trees, and Star Wars is a dispute among
actors?! Does he know anything?!
(Is there nothing
whatever he knows?)
17 "Do you know something?" "No - what?" "I love
you." (There is a certain thing that is true. Do you
know it?)
18 I didn’t understand some
of the jokes. (There were certain jokes I did not understand.)
19 I didn’t understand any
of the jokes. (There were no jokes whatever that I understood.)
Note how in 18 and 19 some
and any could be stressed, and jokes unstressed, or vice versa.
20 They always
welcomed any member of our family with open arms.
21 *They sometimes saw any member of our family in the distance.
21 is nonsense, although its
formal grammatical analysis is exactly the same as that of 20: subject –
frequency adverb – past tense transitive verb – object phrase (identical in the
two sentences) – adverb phrase. The essential difference between the two
sentences is simply the particular meanings of the verbs and adverb phrases
used.
22 There's a thermos of coffee over there.
Anybody’s welcome to help themselves to a cup.
23 Oh hell! Somebody hasn't put the
top back on the thermos!
Notice how in 22
the any compound is
essential, despite the affirmative (whoever it is is welcome), and how in 23
the some compound is essential, despite the negative. 23 means "A
certain person has done this dreadful thing, although I don't know who that
certain person is." But somebody in 22 would mean "There is a
certain person who is welcome to a cup, but I'm not going to tell you / I don’t
know / who it is!", while anybody in 23 would be nonsensical.
Some failings of some
academic grammars:
1 Quirk et al.’s A comprehensive grammar of the English language
Quirk et al. do,
near the beginning of their account of some
and any (Quirk et al., 1985: 783-84), try
to differentiate between them in meaning terms. But not only are their
descriptions wrong; they quickly convert reasonably precise meaning into vague
general meaning. Some is said to be
‘assertive’ and any ‘non-assertive’.
(‘Non-assertive’ is a very questionable term for any – a good case could be made for calling it a very assertive
word.) The authors then move even further away from meaning: the choice of some or any is determined by the grammatical category of the sentence. The any series, they say, ‘appears’ in
negative, interrogative, conditional, and restrictive relative clauses’.
Quirk et al. say that ‘nonassertive items appear … after words that are
morphologically negative or that have negative import’. A single one of their
examples under this heading should suffice to demonstrate how they seem to be
ignoring the fact that some and any have totally different meanings:
24 ‘They can prevent
any demonstration.’
One might want, however, to convey a very different
meaning:
25 They can prevent some demonstrations, but not others.
Much earlier in their grammar
(p.84) Quirk et al. write of the
impossibility of a positive statement containing nonassertive forms. They give
as an example
26 ‘*I have any
ideas.’
Like so many grammarians, they seem to lack the
imagination or the will to think of examples that invalidate their claims.
Here, change the particular meaning of the verb, and one gets a perfectly
sensible sentence:
27 I welcome any
ideas.
There are other flaws
in Quirk et al.’s account of some and any. See an extended review of these in Gethin, 2010c.
2 Rodney
Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum et al.’s
The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language [CGEL]
The basic approach of this massive work, with
its huge number of technical terms and minute examination of sentences, is
similar to that in Quirk et al., but
the grammatical categorising is taken even further. The work devotes, partly or
wholly, more than fifty pages to the subject of some and any and their
compounds (mainly in chapters 5, by John Payne and Rodney Huddleston, and 9, by
Geoffrey K. Pullum and Rodney Huddleston).
The CGEL describes any
as a non-affirmative ‘expression of existential quantification’, indicating ‘a
quantity or number greater than zero’(Huddleston & Pullum et al., 2002: 358-59). This tells one
nothing useful. It conveys nothing of the unique essence of any. One might as well call a or the
expressions of existential quantification, since they too indicate a quantity
or number greater than zero. The authors go on to maintain (on page 360 by
implication, on pages 381 and 383 explicitly) that any has the same sense as some.
Yet on page 359 under [5] they give perfect examples, apparently without
noticing it, of how crucially different in meaning some and any are (cf. 18
and 19 above):
28 ‘He hadn’t eaten some of the meat.’
29 ‘He hadn’t eaten any of the meat.’
This
sort of confusion is almost bound to arise when meanings are converted into
grammatical categories. On page 829 the CGEL insists that ‘positively-oriented’
some is ‘inadmissible’ in the
negative
30 ‘*They didn’t make some mistakes.’
but that, in contrast,
in changed ‘scope’ conditions,
31 ‘I didn’t understand some of the points she
was trying to make.’
is an ‘admissible’
sentence, which they paraphrase as ‘some of the points…had the property that I
didn’t understand them’.
In
fact 30 is in principle exactly the same as 31. The
‘scope’ relationships can be interpreted as identical in the two sentences
(some mistakes had the property that they didn’t make them). It is a good
example of how unusual or unnatural situations in real life can deceive
analysts into thinking that the language expressing such situations is
prohibited by some grammatical law. We can make 30 a bit more realistic by
expanding it a little - This time they
didn’t make some of their usual mistakes – or by stressing some. But the CGEL seems to have determined
in advance that 30 is ‘inadmissible’ and so declares, back-to-front, that the
‘scope’ is such as to make it so. See 18 and
28, and my discussion under General
principles above.
Recognising that any is clearly very often not
‘non-affirmative’, the CGEL creates (p.361) a new category, ‘free choice’ any, as in:
32 ‘Any of these computers will do.’
Of this any the authors say (p.382) ‘an
arbitrary member (or subquantity) can be selected from the set (or quantity)
denoted by the head and the predication property will apply to it.’
This
distinction may be valid up to a point. For example, 33
is ambiguous.
33 I won’t eat any pies.
The sentence could
mean I will eat no pies at all: the any
is the CGEL’s ‘non-affirmative’ type. Or it could mean I will not eat just any
pies, irrespective of quality: the CGEL’s ‘free choice’ type of any. (In practice the intonation of the
sentence will probably vary according to the meaning intended.)
But
the distinction is very fuzzy, and ultimately questionable. Just one instance
from the several one could cite from the CGEL is the case of conditional
sentences. These, such as (p.745)
34 ‘If anyone has a solution to this
problem, please let me know.’
are
supposedly part of the justification for categorising any as ‘non-affirmative’. But they can often be paraphrased to
provide examples of what the CGEL would call ‘free choice’ any:
35 Anyone with a solution to this problem
should kindly let me know.
See Gethin, 2010d, for further detailed
discussion of this and all the other difficulties in the CGEL’s account of some and any.
The CGEL
fails to convey anything of the essential meaning of any. It is much more accurate, practical, and psychologically real
– in the sense that it is the way native English-speakers experience any, unless they are grammatical
analysts - to regard all any’s as one
and the same. They all carry the ‘whatever, whichever’
idea.
The
CGEL, instead, tries to fit any into
its huge, elaborate system of grammatical categories. It claims that
‘non-affirmative’ contexts ‘admit’ ‘negatively-oriented polarity-sensitive
items (NPIs)’, of which the ‘non-affirmative’ any series of words, but not ‘free choice’ any’s (pp.823,826), are an example; while ‘affirmative’ contexts
‘exclude NPIs’ (pp.822-38). All this rigid categorising, however, leads to
difficulties, and sometimes to what seem to be rather desperate attempts to
reconcile apparent contradictions. For instance (p.836) in
36 ‘It would be foolish to take
any unnecessary risks.’
there is
an ‘NPI’ in what appears to be an affirmative context. Not so, says the CGEL
(p.835). Foolish is one of a number
of ‘covertly negative
lexical items with clausal or clause-like complements’, one of a ‘large array
of lexical items expressing unfavourable evaluations’.
I don’t think languages work like that: grammatical categories
admitting or excluding other grammatical categories. We use any in 36, not because foolish is covertly negative, but simply
because any is the word we have to
use in this context if that is the meaning we intend. What else could we say if
that is what we want to say? We could use some,
or many – but they would give the
sentence quite different meanings. Similarly, we do not say
things like I have any books. That is
not because the any is a ‘non-affirmative
quantifier’, but because it is nonsense, while I read any books makes sense. Fundamentally, creating language is
not a negative process of ‘admitting’, or ‘excluding’ or ‘sanctioning’
categories, but a positive one of combining different meanings to make the
sense one wants. Actually, at this point
in the CGEL the authors are not very far from saying precisely this; but their
whole approach prevents them admitting any such thing.
The other key distinction the CGEL makes is between the ‘proportional’ and
‘non-proportional’ use of both some
and any. The authors say that with
‘proportional’ use ‘we are concerned with quantity relative to some larger set’
(p.381); but, they say, in a sentence like
37 ‘There are some
letters for you.’
some is non-proportional.
On pages 364-65, though, they
offer the sentence
38 ‘Some people
don’t know how to say ‘No’.’
as an example of the ‘proportional’ use of some, because, they say, one is ‘talking
about people in general, but people in general constitute a set’. But (in its
most common use) some is practically
always ‘proportional’, always means
a ‘proportion’, a portion, part of a larger set. If I say I have some letters,
or some cheese, I am saying that I have a portion of a larger set.
The CGEL compounds the confusion by linking the analysis
of some and any to the use of stress. ‘Proportional’ some, the authors say (p.381), ‘is stressed, and not reducible to /səm/’, as
in
39 ‘Some people
left early.’
But in talk about human affairs, the idea of people is normally implicit. So if, say,
one is talking about a party or a meeting, one normally has no reason to stress
people. One wants to stress the some idea. If, though, one changes the
topic, for example to ladies or officials, one switches the stress:
40 Some /səm/ ladies/officials left early.
See also sentence 11 above.
Their
confusion over stress continues. They not only say (p.383) that
‘non-affirmative’ any ‘is usually
unstressed’, while ‘free choice’ any
‘is always stressed’; the examples of any
that they give on page 382 as unstressed are in fact stressed, and the ones
they give as stressed are in fact unstressed!
3 Ronald Carter and
Michael McCarthy.
[CGE]
There are good things here. One is the attention paid to
spoken English. Many of the examples are taken from the huge Cambridge
International Corpus of real texts taken from everyday written and spoken
English. The authors show wisdom, though, in emphasizing that ‘the pedagogic
process should be informed by the corpus, not driven or controlled by it.’
(Carter & McCarthy, 2006:12) Another excellent feature is the opening
section of 141 pages which gives detailed explanations of 81 words known to
cause difficulties for learners of English.
Sadly, though, the authors have
apparently succumbed, at least partly, to the disease that seems to infect most
who enter the halls of academic linguistics. This is the Chomskyan illusion of
the primacy of syntax. Large parts of both the book’s organization and its
explanations are on the basis of grammatical categorisation. For instance
(p.481), under ‘Compound nouns’,
The typical … stress pattern is with
stress on the first item (e.g. screwdriver, happy hour),
which helps to distinguish noun compounds from noun modifier + head structures,
where stress is on the noun head (e.g. university
degree, government report).
This back-to-front approach gives the impression that the
CGE’s task is to discover grammatical categories, rather than show students how
to use pieces of language - in this case, where to put the stress. The CGE’s
approach imitates that of Chomsky and
There are other things in the CGE that suggest that there
are some basic principles of language that the authors are unaware of. For
instance, they say (p.7) that computer-assisted research has shown the
patterned relationship between vocabulary and grammar, such as ‘the pattern of
about twenty verbs in English …followed by the preposition by and an –ing clause.’
But hundreds, indeed an indefinite number, of English verbs can be followed by by+-ing.
The correct insight into the relationship between vocabulary and grammar is
gained, not by registering with computers what a sample of people have said, but by recognising what
people can say. See Gethin, 2010f,
and Gethin & Gunnemark, 1996: 298-300.
Where some and any are concerned the CGE is as confused
as the CGEL. If students of English are ever told to study all three of the
works I review here, they will surely be bewildered to find that each one makes
distinctions between some and any that are different from the other
two; and indeed that in the end none of them really distinguish properly
between the meanings of the two words at all.
The CGE in effect tells us that it
is an inexplicable, arbitrary system of stress which determines the use of both
words. I have explained the error of this relationship of stress with some and any above. See my argument around sentences 11, 39 and 40. (The CGE
in fact adds a further error of its own. See Gethin, 2010g, for
a detailed account of all the CGE’s mistakes concerning some and any.)
The
CGE ends up making the same old basic mistakes (pp.366-67):
The use of the weak
forms of some and any depends on whether the clause is
declarative or interrogative, and whether it is affirmative or negative:
…………………
In declarative clauses, some occurs with affirmatives but does
not occur with negatives. Any occurs
with negatives but does not usually occur with affirmatives: ……….
But as we have seen:
(a) some and compounds are often used in
negative declarative clauses, as in examples 9, 15, 18, 23, 28, 30, 31, 38;
(b) any and compounds are often used in
affirmative declarative clauses, as in examples 12, 13, 20, 22, 32, 35, 36;
while the statement that any does not
usually occur with affirmatives
would be useless even if it was true.
(The CGE’s specifying of weak forms is irrelevant. A variety of stress
patterns is possible in the sentences listed.)
Unfortunately, even if the information in Quirk
et al. and the CGEL was unfailingly correct, and
did not so frequently illustrate false principles, studying these grammars
would certainly not be the way to learn English. One learns a foreign language
by observing it in use. One does not learn the true essence of words through
definition and exhaustive analysis. It
is hard to see what purpose these huge works serve. They add nothing to
understanding or real knowledge.
The
CGE could be helpful for students of English. Its greatest usefulness would be
as a reference work. However, this is much reduced by the poor index – try
looking up, for instance, the/definite
article, -ing/gerund, or stress. Unfortunately the search function
on the CD-ROM accompanying the book is in some ways even weaker as a reference
tool than the printed index.
There
is not just the problem that grammarians frequently get the facts wrong. There
is the much more serious and fundamental problem that they often give the wrong
impression of how language works. The Chomskyan illusion persists. Grammarians
sometimes give the impression that meaning can be (or is always?) irrelevant,
that the way words are used is determined by grammatical categories. But as
Michael Bulley says (2007: 56), grammar is not discovered; it is made up.
References
Bulley, M. 2007. ‘No such things as nouns.’ English Today, 23(1), 56-60.
Carter, R.
& McCarthy, M. 2006.
Gethin, A.1990.
Antilinguistics: A Critical Assessment of
Modern Linguistic Theory and Practice.
Gethin, A. 2010a. ‘some and any (and their compounds).’ Online at <www.lingua.org.uk/sa.htm>.
Gethin, A. 2010b. ‘A critical examination of the account of the definite article in Quirk et al.’s A comprehensive grammar of the English language.’ Online at <www.lingua.org.uk/thequirk.html>.
Gethin, A. 2010c. ‘A critical examination of the account of some and any (and their compounds) in Quirk et al.’s A comprehensive grammar of the English language.’ Online at <www.lingua.org.uk/saquirk.htm>.
Gethin, A. 2010d. ‘A critical examination of the account of some and any in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum et al.’ Online at <www.lingua.org.uk/sahuddle.htm>.
Gethin, A. 2010e. ‘A critical examination of the account of stress in word combinations in Cambridge Grammar of English (2006) by Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy.’ Online at <www.lingua.org.uk/stress.htm>.
Gethin, A. 2010f. ‘The –ing form.’ Online at <www.lingua.org.uk/eging.html>.
Gethin, A. 2010g. ‘A critical examination of the account of some and any in Cambridge Grammar of English (2006) by Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy.’ Online at <www.lingua.org.uk/sacart.htm>.
Gethin, A.
& Gunnemark, E.V. 1996. The Art and
Science of Learning Languages.
Huddleston, R.
& Pullum, G.K. et al. 2002. The
Quirk, R.,
Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language.