A corpus study by Mindt (1998) concluded that 50%
of any usage takes place in affirmative statements, 40% in negative statements,
and only 10% in interrogatives. The purpose of this exercise is to get the
students to discover three usage patterns and their relative frequency. These
concordance lines can also be exploited for other purposes such as defining
functions and common language chunks of any. It is assumed that an exercise
like this would be part of a lesson context in which the students were studying
quantifiers or something related.
Affirmative statements: AS
Negative statements: NS
Interrogative statements: IS
A Closer Look at "Any"
Read through the following lines taken from a concordance of the word
any.
- This is going to be a test like any (AS) other test, like, for
example
- working with you.. If there are any
(NS) questions
about how we're going to
- and I didn't receive any(NS) materials for the
November meeting
- and it probably won't make any (NS)
difference. I mean,
that's the next
- You can do it any (AS)
way you want.
- Do you want to ask any (IS)
questions? make any
comments?
- I don't have any (NS) problem with that. I'm
just saying
- if they make any (AS)
changes, they would be
minor changes.
- I think we ought to use any(AS) kind of calculator. I
think that way
- I see it and it doesn't make any (NS)
sense to me, but I can
take that
Source: Corpus of Spoken Professional American
English
What conclusions can you draw about the use of any?
Any is
frequently use in negative statements because there aren´t a big variety of
these kind of phrases to use in these kind of negative affirmations.
Part 2
What are the three main uses of any in order of frequency?
Any 1: Any in negative statements
Any 2: Any in affirmative statements
Any 3: Any in interrogative statements
