On LDOCE, at the definition page of "neither", there is one definition that describes the word as a conjunction, with the sentence:
The authorities were not sympathetic to the students’ demands, neither would they tolerate any disruption.
Is the usage of the word after a comma as a conjunction by itself as in the sentence really grammatical? If so, how often is "neither" used like this? Is this usage of "neither" as common in American English as it is in British English?
Thank you in advance!
Best Answer
Yes, it is grammatical; do you have a particular reason to doubt the reliability of the source you quoted (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English)?
Doesn't my answer to your previous question also cover this case? Specifically, in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), "neither" occurs 74071 times, while "neither" following a comma occurs 9902 times, so the frequency is 13% of the usage of "neither". Seems pretty common to me.
I used "used following a comma" as a way to operationalize your statement "used like this"; if you have a more specific class of usage in mind, you should say so [although a more limited set of grammatical cases might be beyond my capabilities in corpus analysis].
I don't have a handy corpus of British English, so I can't do the British/American usage comparison. In my personal experience (lived 3 years in England, 11 in Canada, more than that in the US) this doesn't stand out to me as an unusual usage in any of those places — although it does seem a little bit formal/old-fashioned.