Exploring the Distribution of AENG, the Old Frisian Counterpart of Modern English ANY, Modern Dutch ENIG.

Old Frisian regularly features a word which is etymologically related to the word any in Modern English, and to enig in Modern Dutch. The purpose of this explorative article is to make a beginning with the description of the distributional properties of this word aeng in old Frisian. We will show that this word, like its Modern English counterpart any, behaves like a negative polarity item. An attempt is made to characterise the range of syntactic / semantic contexts in which it may appear