Re: "Barely but booleanly"

Have never heard 'any' used this way. Feels gratingly ungrammatical
and doesn't make sense to me. :-)

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 6:22 PM, Kelly Alioth Drinkwater
<mizunomi@...> wrote:
> Would the prosody make a difference? IMD, in a sentence like "I can do
> anything", I'd probably put quite a bit of emphasis on the anything,
> whereas "I know any Chinese vocabulary" is patterned just like "I know
> some Chinese vocabulary", without emphasis on any.
>
> (And yes, I'm well aware this is not prescriptively correct. I use it
> consciously.)
>
> On 6/9/08, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 12:19 AM, Kelly Alioth Drinkwater <
>>  mizunomi@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  > Really? Uh oh. How about "I know any Chinese vocabulary"?
>>  >
>>
>>
>> In fact, I think this is even more likely to be interpreted the opposite of
>>  how you intended. For one, I construed you correctly the first time, but was
>>  thrown off by this sentence. Is this "positive 'any'" a common feature of
>>  people's speech in many places? I have never heard of it before and in fact
>>  instinctively class it as prescriptive-wise incorrect, given the meaning of
>>  "any".
>>
>>
>>  Eugene
>>
>