syntactic analysis - How to know when to use "someone" or "anyone"?


I am trying to write a grammar rule that will be able to identify when to use someone or anyone, and I got confused. I couldn't find any clear way to do this.


For instance, "anyone can do it" is totally different from "someone can do it", but since both are pronouns referring to unknown entities, it's extremely difficult to predict the correctness of the grammar.


Any suggestions or am I missing something?



Answer



You are correct. There is no clear way to do this. Robin Lakoff's paper entitled "Some Reasons Why There Can't Be some ~ any Rule" is precisely about this situation.


Short summary of a few of the reasons:



  1. Any is a Negative Polarity Item, but some isn't.

  2. Many environments (like questions) allow NPIs like any, but don't disallow some.

  3. There are several kinds of any, including NPI any, and "Free Choice" any, as in

    • Any idiot can solve this problem.




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