grammar - "There is to be no drinking beer today" What is the status of "no" and "beer" here?



  1. There's no doubting her sincerity.

  2. There's no telling what she's done.

  3. There's no guessing which way they'll bolt.

  4. There's to be no drinking beer today.

  5. There's no telling her.


The word no is usually thought of as a determinative. We expect to see it in Determiner position in noun phrases. Of course, we often see determinatives in Determiner function with deverbal nouns:



  • The reading of books is prohibited.

  • This constituted a breaking of his silence on this topic.


Notice that because the -ing forms above are nouns and not verbs, they cannot take direct objects and the phrases after them are preposition phrases. If we omit the word of the sentences are ungrammatical:



  • *The reading books is prohibited. (ungrammatical)

  • *This constituted a breaking his silence on this topic. (ungrammatical)


My questions therefore are:



  • What part of speech is the word no in examples 1-4?

  • How should we regard the syntactic function/grammatical relations of the word no in relation to the phrases it occurs in?

  • What is the syntactic function of the strings after the -ing forms. (direct object /complement?)

  • What part of speech are these -ing forms?




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