Thread: the "at all"...

Is there any difference:

1. You are not old at all!

2. You are not at all old!

Do the both sound natural?

Let natives decide, but I don't think I've ever met the #2 construction.

Переводя на русский получается большая разница. =)
1. Ты совсем не старый.
2. Ты не совсем старый.

Originally Posted by Ramil

Let natives decide, but I don't think I've ever met the #2 construction.

I think very rarely I've seen/heard something like the second one, but it is very rare. I think the most common way to find it is in philosophical language like so:

"It is not at all the case that ..."
"It is not at all true that ..."

Normally in this construction the adjective goes after "not".

For some reason it is different in the related expression "in the least bit"

"I am not in the least bit hungry."
In this construction it is more common to have the adjective at the end.

Thanks

Both look perfectly fine to me. I prefer the second one, but you're probably more likely to hear the first.

Originally Posted by scotcher

Both look perfectly fine to me. I prefer the second one, but you're probably more likely to hear the first.

So they mean the same?

Originally Posted by Оля

Originally Posted by scotcher

Both look perfectly fine to me. I prefer the second one, but you're probably more likely to hear the first.

So they mean the same?

I suppose if you were splitting hairs you could argue that the first sentence is more of a challenge, retort or contradiction to someone else's statement while the second could be more of a neutral assertion in its own right, but I can't think of any context where only one of them would sound correct.

As scotcher says: 1.You are not old at all! is more emphatic than 2. You are not at all old!

With normal pronounciation the main stress of sentence 1. falls on the adverbial 'at all' pointing to the complete falseness of the idea: You are not old at all. In fact, you are very young.

In sentence 2. the word 'old' is emphasised so the sense could be: You may be a little eccentric/grumpy/in poor health but you are not all old.

I'm sure you know that in many languages word order can be used to express shades of meaning, with the beginning and end of the sentence being the strongest positions.