A note on any and simplification

Vincent Rouillard (MIT)

In von Fintel (1999), the author uses the acceptability of any in the antecedent of conditionals to argue in favor of (i) an alternative to the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics for conditionals (cf. von Fintel 2001) and (ii) a licensing condition for NPIs formulated in terms of Strawson downward entailment. I review the argument and show that simplification inferences drawn from indefinites in the antecedent of conditionals appear to defuse it. Drawing on recent work by Crnič (2022), I show that the argument preserves its bite once we take into consideration sentences where the restrictor of any is a plural NP.