3 ms·
You are using examples which are typically plural. Consider instead these singular forms: "My shelf contains no Elf-on-a-Shelf" / "My shelf contains no elephan
by eesmith 2y ago
You are using examples which are typically plural. Consider instead these singular forms:
"My shelf contains no Elf-on-a-Shelf" / "My shelf contains no elephant" / "My shelf contains no Hemingway book." / "My shelf contains no book by Hemingway."
(For an example of the third: "Don't look there for a copy of 'The Old Man and the Sea'? I detest Hemingway, and my shelf contains no Hemingway book." In this case, 'no' means something like 'not even one'.)
As for the others, "legs" rarely come in a singular form. There is (usually) only one king for an entire population, and there is (usually) only one soul per creature, so these singular forms are just fine:
"Snails have no king." / "Snails have no soul."
There's usually a lot of stars, but our solar system has but one sun, making the following singular form just fine:
"What if there were no sun in the sky?"
- philipwhiuk 2y agoThe 'correct' English is "no books by Hemmingway"
- eesmith 2y agoThat's "Hemingway" ;) I think the original sentence was already pretty weird, since I wouldn't say "My shelf contains no books." making it hard for me to judge what is not weird. However, "Does your shelf contain a book by Hemingway?" sounds equally correct to "No, my shelf contains no book by Hemingway." And equally correct to "My shelf contains no books."
- eesmith 2y agoUpon review, I realized the parallel construction in "No, my shelf contains no book by Hemingway, but it does contain one by Hemmingway" would help smooth things out. More to the point, https://archive.org/details/stephencranebiog00stal/page/40/mode/2up?q=%22contains+no+book+by%22 https://archive.org/details/stephencranebiog00stal/page/40/m... has this real-world example: "Although Crane’s list of books at Brede Place contains no book by James Fenimore Cooper, he obviously knew his Cooper."