I wasn't taught how to form a tag question when the main sentence involves "no". Is it grammatical to say
There's no problem with the car, is there?
There's no apples left in the carton, are there?
The poor man has nowhere to go, does he?
Nobody cares about it, does anybody?
It has nothing to do with the incident, does it?
Nothing is as precious as unobtainium, is anything?
(Some of the above examples might not sound natural. It would be great if you could suggest me better alternatives.)
Answer
The Original Poster has the right idea about the grammar here. When we have negative sentences, the question tags must be positive, not negative.
One small, but important point though: usually, we can only use basic personal pronouns in question tags (I, she, he, it, we, you, they, there). We don't normally use compound pronouns such as:
- anybody/anyone/anything
- somebody/someone/something
- nobody/no one/nothing.
With the words ending in -body or -one, we normally use the pronoun they:
- Somebody applied for the job, didn't they?
- Nobody applied for the job, did they?
- Not just anyone can apply, can they?
If we know that we are only thinking about males or females we very occasionally use he or she, but this is quite rare.
When we use the pronouns ending in -thing, we normally use the personal pronoun it in the tag:
- Nothing went wrong, did it?
- Anything could happen, couldn't it?
- Something exciting happened, didn't it?
The Original Poster's examples
The Original Poster's examples are all fine apart from the ones using the pronouns nobody and nothing. These would be better like this:
Nobody cares about it, do they?
Nothing is as precious as unobtainium, is it?
No comments:
Post a Comment