ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a position on any which as defined as such and has not been seriously considered before, though something similar was proposed for superlatives by Fauconnier. This position does not draw a semantic distinction between uses of any in environments of Classes A and B, but it assigns any to the existential quantifier rather than the universal quantifier. There are some reasons to believe that topics and subjects are particularly subject to conversational implicature. If the generic reading is conversationally implicated, then this meaning ought to be able to be cancelled or reinforced, and to be subject to contextual manipulation. The force of these arguments depends on how highly one values generalisations about natural languages which may transcend the borders of one language or class of linguistic facts, and to what extent a linguistic description should be 'real' in that it models the units and rules of combination which constitute a natural language.
