Patrick Duffley* and Pierre Larrivée The use of any with factive predicates https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2018-0034 Abstract: While Negative Polarity Items are generally ungrammatical in veridical environments (*I said anything), they are known to be found in factive environ- ments that involve veridicality (I regret you said anything). There is however disagreement in the literature about the types of factive environments in which any is found. This paper proposes the first systematic large-scale survey of the use of any with factive predicates. Based on corpora totaling nearly 5 billion words, the paper establishes the relative frequency of any licensed by the different factive predicates (epistemic factives, as well positive, negative and counterexpectative emotives). Negative emotive factives (e.g. regret) were found to license any 1.8 times more frequently than counterexpectative factives (be amazed), which license any 25.8 times more than do positive emotives (be glad). Emotive factives are associated with counterfactual preferences and expecta- tions that make available a negative reading that licenses any. The examination of the data does not support a rescuing analysis that separates these occur- rences of any from other licensed uses. On the contrary, the data show that any is licensed by at-issue meaning, as proposed by (Horn, Laurence. 2016. Licensing NPIs: Some negative (and positive) results. In Pierre Larrivée & Chungmin Lee (eds.), Negation and polarity. Experimental and cognitive perspec- tives, 281–305. Dordrecht: Springer.). Keywords: active verbs, emotive factives, veridicality, polarity sensitivity, any, licensing, rescuing, at-issue meaning 1 Introduction There is a certain malaise in the polarity literature concerning the compat- ibility between factive predicates and Polarity Sensitive Items, with seemingly contradictory proposals being found even in studies published by the very same author. Thus Giannakidou (2009: 1889–1890) affirms that “polarity *Corresponding author: Patrick Duffley, Département de langues, linguistique et traduction, Pavillon De Koninck, local 2289, 1030, avenue des Sciences-Humaines, Université Laval, Québec, QC G1V 0A6, Canada, E-mail: Patrick.Duffley@lli.ulaval.ca Pierre Larrivée, Département des Sciences du Langage, Université de Caen Normandie, Esplanade de la Paix, CS 14032, 14032 Caen Cedex 5, France, E-mail: Pierre.Larrivee@Unicaen.fr Linguistics 2019; 57(1): 195–219