What is the appropriate question tag for sentences such as "Neither of you is..."?

Neither of you is going to the show tonight, ____?

Should it be isn't he/she? I think the fact that neither of you takes the third-person singular verb is means that a third-person question tag ought to be used. But it sounds so awfully strange. So does the second-person alternative aren't you? You can trivially replace all question tags with right? in informal speech, but aside from that, what is the appropriate question tag to use in such sentences?

EDIT: Oh right, I should have realized that. How careless of me. But can you explain why you would use "are you" instead of "isn't he/she", even though "neither of you" is a third-person reference?

Solution 1:

The correct tag would be are you?

Neither of you is going to the show tonight, are you?

Note that the main part of the sentence is implicitly negative, because of neither, which explains the choice of are you? over aren't you?

Solution 2:

Neither of you is going to the show equates to You are not going to the show. And you are not going either. The correct tag for these equivalent sentences is are you and I would suggest this is the correct tag to your original statement: Neither of you is going to the show, are you?

Solution 3:

Tag questions don't always follow the simple agreement rules. For one thing, they can occur in sentences that have undergone some strange syntax, like There-insertion.

I have an exercise on Tag Question Formation for my English grammar classes; it's designed for native English speakers, who can fill in the blanks automatically. However, then they have to figure out how the rule works, and that's by no means obvious.

One thing that can help is that any Noun Phrase like "X of T" can usually be analyzed

either

• as a NP X modified by a prepositional phrase of T (so the verb agrees with X)

or

• as a quantifier X (of) modifying a NP T (so the verb agrees with T).

Solution 4:

According to CGEL, neither of you is a partitive construction, and you is called the partitive oblique. It mentions cases in which "the antecedent is construed as plural with respect to subject-verb agreement. Here the pronoun takes its person and number from the partitive oblique. But also includes cases in which "the antecedent takes a 3rd person singular verb but a 1st or 2nd person plural pronoun," but opines, "many will feel that this difference makes the construction less than fully felicitous (and would feel more comfortable with a plural verb), but for others it is acceptable and explicable in terms of the potentially more mechanical nature of subject-verb agreement."