samgyupsal wrote:
Hi experts,
I have a question on this topic here. I ran across a sentence on an MIT technology review article today, and I wanted to get clarification on this: Within the following, is it grammatical to have this usage of "neither...nor"?
"...neither program heads, department chairs, attending physicians, nor nursing staff were involved in the original algorithm design."
(1) there are multiple people here, but neither/nor (and either/or) has to have two entities.
That you have to have two entities only when you use "neither ... nor" is debated. Many people consider it fine to use "neither ... nor" with more than two.
Quote:
(2) if we assume that what comes after the neither is correct, isn't the verb after staff incorrect? Shouldn't it be "was?" "Neither/nor" depends on what comes after the nor part - i.e., if it's singular, we need a singular verb. if it's plural, we need a plural verb.
In this case, the collective noun "staff" is not used for naming a singular entity. The staff itself would not be "involved." The individual staff members would. So, "staff" is understood to be plural here, and thus using "were" makes sense.
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