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Consider the following sentence:

Dishwashers are not regarded as remarkable objects or luxurious.

as you know it is possible to use the two-word conjunction "neither .... nor ..." to combine two word groups and thus I could rewrite the aforementioned sentence like this:

Dishwashers and vacuum cleaners are regarded as neither remarkable objects nor luxurious.

However a grammar book I'm studying states that the answer is as follows:

Dishwashers and vacuum cleaners are regarded neither as remarkable objects nor as luxurious

is it ungrammatical to use neither after "as" ?

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  • To be clear, no: aside from the awkwardness of the sentence, positioning "neither" either before or after "as" are both okay ("I'm seen as neither a good guy nor a bad guy" / "I'm seen neither as a good guy nor as a bad guy"—note the second version needs an extra "as"). This is one of those times when the "right answer" in a book is not the only answer. Nov 30, 2021 at 19:24

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I find your original sentence questionable, as the two terms being coordinated are not parallel: remarkable objects is a noun phrase, luxurious is an adjective. I have no doubt that people say things like this sometimes, but it is odd.

Consequently, your purported rewrite neither remarkable objects nor luxurious is equally strange. The grammar book's version with neither outside the scope of the as works better for me.

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  • The construction suggests the rather archaic or poetic (but technically valid) construction that projects one noun onto two adjectives, even to the point of repeating an article, but omitting the second instance of the noun: "He was a good man and a brave." In the textbook's example, the very first sentence could have benefitted from simply deleting "objects." Nov 30, 2021 at 19:19

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