Re: any

[ucleaar <ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk>]

pc:
> And asks for "Any two people can sit on this couch" (I assume "at the
> same time") without using something like _xe'e_.  But this is an easy
> context-leaper case, the home ground of that concept: "for any x and y
> different from one another and both people, it can be the case that both
> sit on this counch at the same time." The universal just has to get
> outside the scope of the "can," which is hard to show in English.

My failure of understanding is that it seems to me that you need to
add "so long as noone else is sitting on the sofa": "for every x and
every y, such that x is not y and x and y are people, x and y can
sit on the sofa at the same time if noone else is sitting on it".
Certain uses of English 'any' seem to be, as you say, context leaping
universal quantifiers, *but with the implicit so-long-as clause*.
Thus "I need to obtain exactly two books" (nonspecific books) is
   "For every x and every y such that x and y are books and I don't have x
    and I don't have y, ***and such that there is no v  and no w such that
    I need to obtain v and w, and v isn't x or y and w isn't x or y***,
    I need to obtain x and y"
(I hope that says what I want, though I expect I've cocked it up somehow).

That at any rate is why I asked you about pairs of people sitting on
sofas.

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And