Welcome back to the 4level1 English Blog. Today’s topic is seeking to understand the difference between “NOT” and “NO”.
First, we use both to reply by negation. The difference between both is found in the location of the word in the sentence. On a side note, we cannot use both together in one sentence. This gives no meaning. So, we cannot say: “We did not have no attendees”. Instead, you can say: “We have no attendees” or “We haven’t had any attendees”.
For NO, the first case is the question. We use NO to reply to a question.
For instance,
1/
Question: Are you coming to the party?
Answer: No
And in the answer, It usually comes before a noun; it means “not any”. In this form, we do not use any definite or indefinite articles like the, an, a. Also, you should notice that if the noun after NO is plural, it should be counted as plural and the opposite is right.
For instance,
2/
There are no other orders left.
There is no reason to be afraid of going out.
You can also use NO before an adjective that represents a noun. But, this can happen without any articles.
For instance,
3/
No young people went to the office.
There are beautiful flowers in the garden.
For NOT, it can be used in almost every other situation other than those used with no. Sometimes, it can be shortened (but not in formal English) to “N’T”.
The first case for NOT is that we use it to make a verb negative. In that case, we cannot use another negative word such as ‘nothing’, ‘never’, or ‘none’.
For instance,
1/
She did not want to go to her other house.
We didn’t find the location.
NOT can be used with an adjective without a noun.
For instance,
2/
It’s not worth it.
That is not okay!
Third case is that we can use NOT with an adverb.
