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Eagleflych Posted 18 years ago
Grammar

There's not an onion？

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00Hi everybody:02br
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00I've seen the negative sentence below in a book and I've not understood it's meaning. Please help me.02br
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00"There's not an onion in the house."05002br
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00Does it mean "The number of onions in the house is zero" or "The number of onions in the house is not one and may be two, three, etc"?02br
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00Thanks a lot.02br
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010id4
  

Top answer

"02br 02br 00There's not a soul in the room. )02br 02br 00There's not a parking spot to be found. )02br 02br 00Who ate all the candy?

— BarbaraPA

  • "02br 02br 00There's not a soul in the room.
  • )02br 02br 00There's not a parking spot to be found.
  • )02br 02br 00Who ate all the candy?
  • There's not a single piece in this bag!
  • 0-
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5 Answers
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0For standard, straight-forward declarations, I would say "There are no onions," not "There's not an onion."02br
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00However, for empahsis, you can say "There's not a [whatever] in the [whatever]."02br
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00There's not a soul in the room. (No one is there.)02br
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00There's not a parking spot to be found. (There are no parking pl
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0Yes, it means the number of onions is zero. 02br
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00"There wasn't a dry eye in the house" is almost idiomatic - as GG says, for emphasis.02br
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00Congratulations on your first post, Eagleflych, and WELCOME TO THE FORUMS!0-
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0 01blockquote
01cite10Avangi12cite10"There wasn't a dry eye in the house"12blockquote
10 Do you think there's a connection between this one and the 'onion' one?02br
00Could the 'onion' sentence have meant 01i00The play is so bad it fails to cause anyone in the audience to cry02i00 ?02br

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0Sorry, CJ, I had made a connection in my original post, but the system was going nuts and kept swallowing the post. I lost my cool. The context connection would have been humorous (I had hoped) but the grammatical point was simply that, yes, these are common.02br
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00Woops! I missed the laughing face. Not my day.0-
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0How strange! And what a coincidence! I was having trouble at the same time with this thread. My post got posted twice and then swallowed my deletion request. Weird stuff going on! 05002br
00CJ 010id1
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