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There is an expression "there's no telling" and a proverb "There's no accounting for taste", the meanings being clearly explained here and here.
My question is this:
Is there any particular grammar rule for this ("there's no" + an "-ing" verb) construction, for hard as I tried, the only explanation I did find was in the entry "No" in here.
Would it be right to say that this construction may be used to express the idea of the impossibility of an action, for example:
There's no making her change her mind.
There's no persuading him into selling his old car.
There's no beating him at tennis.
There was no denying that she had a lovely figure?
Victor B.
Posted 2016-12-12T14:55:26.490
Reputation: 8 293
3I have taken the liberty of changing your third example, "There's no winning him at tennis"--this is ungrammatical because win does not take the defeated party as object, but that error is not relevant to your question. – StoneyB on hiatus – 2016-12-12T15:07:58.280
3Your example #3 should be *There's no beating him at tennis* (idiomatically, winning doesn't work like that). Other than that, they're all perfectly grammatical, but in practice #1 would usually be There's no changing her mind, and #2 would be There's no persuading him to sell his old car. But apart from the well-established idiomatic usage There's no denying [that] [uncontested assertion], they're all a bit "affected" in modern conversational contexts. And the whole construction is effectively informal, so it should be used with care. – FumbleFingers Reinstate Monica – 2016-12-12T15:08:27.117
@FumbleFingers: Thank you very much for highly informative notes. – Victor B. – 2016-12-12T15:16:02.237