grammaticality - Which is correct: "There are not any employees" or "There is not any employee"?


Sometimes I see two variants of following sentence:



  • "there are not any employees" in the department

  • "there is not any employee" in the department


What is the correct sentence?



Answer



As long as you are referring to more than one subject, I would go with:



There are not any employees in the department.



For referring to a single instance, I would go with "there is no"



There is no employee in the department.



If the topic has no plural form (or is rarely used with a plural form), then I would consider "there isn't any":



"There isn't any water" = There is no water



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