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Hi,

could someone explain to me the following structure?

Pourquoi est-ce qu'aucun chercheur autre que vous ne parle de ce sujet?

Pourquoi est-ce qu'aucun autre chercheur que vous ne parle de ce sujet?

Pourquoi n'y a-t-il aucun autre chercheur que vous qui parle de ce sujet?


I don't understand why "que vous ne parle" has no "pas". Is this because the sentence contains an inversion of "ne...que?" 

Thank you

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Almost -- the negative elements that go together in this case are "ne ... aucun". But yes, that's why there's no "pas". A negative sentence will have "ne" to 'introduce' the negative, then the main negative element(s)-- be it "pas", "rien", "que" or ... in this case ... "aucun".

As in this case, you can actually end up with the 'main' negative element ("pas", "rien", "aucun" etc) coming earlier in the sentence than the "ne", but the "ne" is still present. (This actually differs from, e.g. Spanish where if you have the "main" negative element earlier than the corresponding "no", the "no" actually disappears.)

Was thinking this was the reason but wasn't sure so didn't say anything!

And thank you for saying that about Spanish! I have been learning some and didn't understand why the "no" went away after "nunca!"

I must say, the 3rd sentence was the one which I found the easiest to understand.  Had it not been there, it would have taken me a lot longer to understand the meaning of the other two.  Is there a register difference between the sentences or is it merely different styles?

Good question ! Thanks for posting.

The second one is a sentence that you can more likely see in a everyday life conversation.

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