There statue at the Oakland/Berkeley border. Photo by Joe Sciarrillo. |
When she published Everybody's Autobiography two years later [1937], saying there was "no there there," it was written to reflect painful nostalgia about her home being gone and the land around it being completely changed. The house where she grew up was on a sprawling 10-acre plot surrounded by orchards and farms. By 1935, it had been replaced by dozens of houses. Oakland held a special significance to her, and on her return, she found that Oakland had urbanized and changed from the pastoral place she remembered.
Matt Werner, Huffington Post
Gertrude Stein-Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
(link to complete text)
What is the grammatical significance of "there"?
Part of Speech: The word 'there' can either be a pronoun or adverb depending on how it is used in a sentence. If you use it to describe a location (it is there), it would be a pronoun. If you put the word before a verb (there is), then it would be an adverb.
In Stein's quotation:
...there [adverb before verb] is no there [pronoun-absence of location] there (pronoun-location)
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