Sentence nº31585
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Comments
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In all honesty, this sentence is an abomination. What is wrong with "Nothing is there." or "Nothing's there." or even "There's nothing."? -
Here's how it could be used: "Is there something there?" "There's nothing there". Why is it an abomination? -
Apologies for the slow reply: I was being hyperbolic to say "abomination", but I guess that I sense a perverse overuse of the expression "There is..." and its variants. This sentence exemplifies the way in which the aforementioned expression has come to be completely divorced from its root in the locative adverb "there". Native speakers tend to treat it as a single semantic unit, and I find this practice somewhat.....lazy, perhaps? Maybe I will make these notions more precise in future.
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