"He was neither seer nor prophet" How would you explain the absence of an article?

Question

Here's a fragment from Jack London's Star Rover:

Wordsworth knew. He was neither seer nor prophet, but just ordinary man like you or any man. What he knew you know, any man knows. But he most aptly stated it in his passage that begins "Not in utter nakedness, not in entire forgetfulness.

To the best of my — admittedly sketchy — knowledge of grammar, the second sentence should read neither a seer nor (a) prophet, but just an ordinary man. Even if we accept the seer and the prophet as "poetic entities" ("father and son," "robber and robbed," "man to man," or whatever), logic would still dictate that ordinary man should be preceded by an an.

It is a well-known fact that Jack London's usage wasn't always up to par; his grammar, on the other hand, was always top-notch.

Logically, the sentence is grammatically incorrect (correct me if I'm wrong: no pun intended).

Illogically, it reads smoothly: intuitively, a native speaker understands that there's nothing wrong here.

However, those to whom English is not the first language cannot be expected to be intuitive in this case and would want an explanation. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Bare Coordination

This phenomenon is one that is not at all well understood, and also one which is currently the subject of much academic research. It is an example of Bare Coordination. This is when coordinated noun phrases (NPs) which we would otherwise expect to take a determiner of some description appear "bare" with no determiner or article at all. By coordinated, we mean that they appear in phrases using the coordinators and, or, but and so forth (some people call coordinators coordinating conjunctions)

Here are some more examples:

• A black cat and a brown dog were fighting in the street. Cat and dog were equally filthy.
• Are you man or mouse?
• I was nursemaid, mistress and mother to those children.
• I had pen and paper ready to make notes.
• Mother and child were said to be recovering well.
• He appeared to be millionaire and homeless vagabond at the same time.

Bare Co-ordination versus Bare Role NPs

Notice that these aren't bare role NP's which specify a unique role. Bare role NPs can occur freely as Predicative Complements without a determiner. The nouns in these coordinations cannot appear bare when not in a coordination:

Bare role NP

• He was Managing Director at Boots.
• Who's going to be Best Man?
• We elected her treasurer.

Nouns from the Bare Coordinations

• *He was millionaire. (ungrammatical)
• *He used to be cat. (ungrammatical)
• *Are you mouse? (ungrammatical)

Notice as well that bare role NP's can only function as Predicative Complements. However, bare co-ordinations can appear freely in Subject or Object function:

Bare Coordination:

• Father and son came to see me. (Subject)
• We punished licensee and client together for the misdemeanour. (Direct Object)

Bare Role NP

• *Chief executive was an arse. (Subject, ungrammatical)
• *I punched Managing Director. (Object, ungrammatical)

How to explain the example

Here we see a co-ordination of three NPs functioning as the complement of the verb BE. The co-ordinators involved are and and but. We know that we can sometimes use nouns without articles when they occur with words like and, or and but, but we do not understand a lot about this phenomenon. What we do know is that very often these noun phrases describe what type of thing some other entity is:

• He was both sinner and saint.
• Are you man or mongoose?
• It was cat and dog rolled into one.
• Judge jury and executioner were all dismissed.

This seems to be why Jack London has chosen to use bare coordination here. It gives the writing a literary flavour.

Further reading

Here's a couple of articles on bare coordination:

• Heycock and Zamparelli: Coordinated Bare Definites

• Bare_coordination_the_semantic_shift

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Answer 2

I believe that the lack of article is related to "seer", "prophet" and "man" all referring to a class rather than a particular instance of that class. And so it is that I put no article in front of the word "article" in my first sentence of this answer.

Answer 3

The key to the grammar here is that neither can function as a determiner, although it doesn't have to. And in fact, it can simultaneously function as a determiner and as a conjunction. Consider this Ngram: neither doctor nor is somewhat more common than neither a doctor nor. When you replace neither by not, not a doctor is much more frequent than not doctor.

Why doesn't ordinary man have an article in front of it? Presumably to make it match neither seer nor prophet.