I went to Uniqlo today and saw that following:
たった1枚の Tシャツにも、 平和のために できることがある。
It took me a little while to figure out what was going on with できることがある. I assume that the こと is being used to nominalize できる. Personally I always just use の to nominalize verbs so I did a bit of reading trying to understand the difference between こと and の.
Questions:
1. Could you use の here? From what I read, this doesn’t look like a case where you have to useこと。I did a search on Google and basically found no cases for できるのがある so I assume using こと is pretty standard.
2. Can I use できることがない to express something that can’t be done?
Thanks for the help
5 comments
This isn’t a grammatical use of ことがある, I believe. Just the literal meaning ‘There are things that even a single T-shirt can do for the sake of peace’. Thus it cannot be replaced with の.
Aside from it being an idiomatic use of こと, の May imply a physical thing, rather than an action.
Are you sure you can consider this こと a nominalizer? To me it feels just like “Things you can do for the sake of (achieving?) peace” がある. I could see it used as a nominalizer in such a phrase “平和のためになにかができることは無理な考え方でわない” or something. In this last sentence you actually use こと to address the previous verb and consequently the previous phrase, while in the one you provided, you could just substitute it with things.
I’m still learning so take my comment with a grain of salt, and please correct me if I’m wrong.
Edit:
Based on what I said, since こと isn’t really a nominalizer, using の doesn’t really make sense. For better understanding the nominalizing function maybe read [this](https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/nounparticles), the “The 「の」 particle” section.
This sentence just means “There are things I can do”.
できる – Verb for can do
こと – thing
がある – there is
できることもある just means there are things that can also be done.
If you wanted to reverse the meaning and say there are things that also can’t be done, you’d day できないこともある
できることがない means there is nothing I can do but feels a bit clunky.