I never saw him, let alone touch/touched/touching him.
Which verb form should I use here?
I know that let alone is a marginal coordinator and the verb should be paralleled to the previous construction as in "I can hardly walk, let alone run. I have not read the first chapter, let alone finished the book. (A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language)
The problem arises when the sentence has a tense verb only. I found the following sentence in Longman Dictionary.
Keeper Judge never touched him let alone trip him.
As you can see, the construction does not follow parallelism and it does not have a comma either. All my life I used to know that It must have a comma.
Now look at the following sentence taken from The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, page 1319.
Few people [ have seen the document,] [ let alone know what's in it].
They say that the coordination is between finite verb phrases. If coordination between finite verb phrases is possible in this construction, then why not "Keeper Judge never touched him let alone tripped him"?
Original Post
Replies sorted oldest to newest