There isn't much that's funny about it

Question

There isn’t much that’s funny about it.Is "much" a noun and a real subject modified by the relative clause "that's funny about it" in the sentence above? ----------I think it is.

BillJ · Accepted Answer

There isn’t much that’s funny about it.

Some would say that, but it would be wrong in your example (see below). The grammatical subject is undoubtedly the dummy pronoun "there", and "much that's funny about it" is a displaced subject.

Normally, displaced subjects correspond to the subject of the syntactically more basic construction. e.g.

There isn't a doctor available ~ A doctor isn't available

but sometimes a basic version is not possible, which is the case with your example: we can't say *Much that's funny about it there isn't.

The term 'bare existential' is sometimes used to describe those constructions that have no basic version, so even though "much that's funny about it" is a displaced subject, it cannot function as subject of the basic version, and hence it could not be said to be the 'real' subject.

There isn't much that's funny about it

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