I’ll be honest, this is for school. But it’s not a homework question. It’s just something I’m trying to figure out for a paper I’m writing. I can’t find an answer to this in any of my references, so I’m just going to seek the help of French speakers.
When I’m expressing absense of something, I know the basic way of saying it is to say (for example)
“Il n’y a pas de. . .” with the “de” replacing the article.
HOWEVER, if I’m expressing the absense of many things, do I say “Il n’y a pas de (), de (), et de ().” or do I say the last two articles as le, la, les. . . etc? Please help. I’ve exhausted my resources.
Il n’y a pas de (), de () et de () is correct. “Il n’y a pas de pain, de beurre, de confiture”, for instance. Though generally, you would add “ni” (nor) before each following missing item in the list. “Il n’y a pas de pain, ni de beurre, ni de confiture dans le placard”.
“Il n’y a pas de pain, de beurre ET de confiture” isn’t correct. You can say either “de pain, de beurre, de confiture” or “de pain, de beurre NI de confiture”. Using “et” wouldn’t be a big mistake, though, an it would most certainly go unoticed.
Clairobscur is absolutely right, but if you want to be a little more picky the syntax would be “il n’y a ni pain ni beurre ni confiture” (omitting the pas+article construction).
The use of the definite article is not mandated by the position of your nouns in a list though.
The reason you don’t use the definite article (le, la, les) in your example is that you’re not talking about a specific item, you’re talking about a category “bread” - equivalent to the English “there isn’t any bread” vs “Did you eat the bread?”
If you’re talking about specific items eg. “Il n’y a pas les produits que j’ai commandés la semaine dernière, il n’y a ni le pain ni la confiture”, you use the definite article.
Another case would be “Je n’ai ni le temps ni la patience pour répondre à ce genre de question.”
In several European languages, the way to indicate negative possession is with a partitive rather than an object.
English says: “I don’t have {any} bread.” ({any} being optional)
French and Russian say, in effect: “In my possession there is not {any} of {the substance} bread.”
To get annoyingly philosophical on a simple question, English treats the (limited quantity of) a substance that you might have had as what you don’t have; French and Russian treat the universal quantity of “all things which are bread” as the generic category from which the specific quantity you have is none.
