Using "nor" alone

[Miss Mae]

Can nor be used without its "partner," neither?

[Joe Carillo]

Sorry for this delayed reply. I missed reading your posting and it’s only now that I got to see it in the discussion board.

Definitely yes, the conjunction “nor” can be used without the conjunction “neither.” On its own, “nor” is used to introduce the second or last member or the second and each following member of a series of items, each of which is negated, as in the sentence “The burden wasn’t carried by you nor me nor by anyone for that matter.”

Of course, when only two members of a series of items are involved, “nor” works with “neither” in the negative correlative form “neither…nor,” as in “Neither you nor me carried the burden.” This construction follows the traditional grammar rule that the negative correlative “neither…nor” should only be used to mean “not one or the other of two.” When the reference is to “none of several,” “none” instead of “neither” is used: “None of the five reelectionists passed the advocacy group’s integrity test.”

Also without the conjunction “neither,” the conjunction “nor” is used to introduce and negate a following clause or phrase in a sentence, as in “The candidate didn’t mind being labeled a family dynast, nor did she mind being deemed unqualified.” On a more profound note, the same stand-alone usage of “nor” is used in Psalm 121:6 of the New International Version of the Bible: “The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.”

[Musushi-tamago]

In your example for the use of “neither…nor,” “Neither you nor me carried the burden,” I think the “me” should be “I” because it is a doer of the action. Am I right?

[Joe Carillo]

You’re absolutely right and I’m sorry for the oversight! The pronoun “me” should be “I” instead because it’s in the nominative case, meaning that it’s doing the action of the verb, not receiving that action. That sentence should therefore read as follows: “Neither you nor I carried the burden.”

This usage of the nominative pronoun “I” in that sentence is in contrast to that of the objective pronoun “me” in the example I presented earlier, “The burden wasn’t carried by you nor me nor by anyone for that matter.” Here, “me” is correct usage because the sentence is in the passive voice. In that passive voice construction, “me” isn’t a doer of the action but an object or receiver of the action of the passive verb form “wasn’t carried.”

For a discussion of how the nominative case differs from the objective case, click this link to this earlier posting of mine in the Forum, “Lesson 3 – The Matter of Case in English.” 

Thanks for the feedback!

[Miss Mae]

Thank you, too, Sir!