Did you learn in your class of English that you should use either for positive sentences?
I want either cake or ice cream for dessert.
And you should use neither for negative sentences?
I want neither cake nor ice cream for dessert.
Even though these sentences are both grammatically correct, we hardly ever use the second sentence in daily spoken English.
In fact, if you said the second sentence, people will look at you with a little slits in their eyes: and say: ' what? Is he a little rare professor from 1800?' So what should you use instead?
Well, we usually just simple useor for negatives sentences.
Take a look at what happens to this sentence:
I don’t want cake or ice cream for dessert.
I don’t want either (option).
There is actually a word omitted here-(option). We don’t need to say the word: option. Because either already implies there are at least two things here.
Is there ever a correct and natural way to use the word: neither?
The most common situation to useneither is if I said:
I don’t like politics.
Me neither.
-You are agreeing with my negative statements.
But here is the tricky part:
I could say:I don’t like politics.
You could say: Me either.
You could use the positive word to agree with my negative sentence.
So which one of these is actually correct?
Me neither--- Technically, this is correct, you should probably use it in business situations or formal situations.
But in daily spoken English, you are definitely gonna hear people say:me either. This is grammatically incorrect. But natively speakers use this a lot.
总而言之，就是either用的较多，neither用的很少:)
Source: Vanessa English.com
|
|
转播
