Dear Ed:

If you remember, this thread began with a call for help. A student 
was confused about the grammatical structure of the sentence *He 
worked for as long as he could.* In particular, the question was: Is 
*for as long as* a prepositional phrase, or an adverbial phrase? The 
confusion was coming from the fact that the sentence component *for 
as long as*” was beginning with a preposition, which is typical of 
prepositional phrases, but had no noun head, which is rather 
untypical of prepositional phrases. So, what was the solution to the 
problem?

After two weeks of e-mail exchanges which seemed to increase the 
confusion rather than eliminate it, I proposed that the sentence *He 
worked for as long as he could* was rather anomalous, and that the 
preposition *for* was redundant. I also suggested a revision of the 
sentence into *He worked as long as he could.* Such a revision would 
make the grammatical analysis of the sentence much simpler.

After I had produced a few tree structures of the sentence, I came to 
the conclusion that the syntactic structure in question was a complex 
sentence composed of a main clause, *He worked,* and a subordinate 
clause *He could (work),* linked through a complex subordinating 
adverb, *as long as.* I believe that this is the best solution to the 
problem related to the syntactic structure in question.

My students come very seldom to me with difficult grammar questions, 
and I ignore *grammatical anomalies* of this kind which appear in 
their essays. But if one of them came to me, confused by a syntactic 
structure such as the one above, instead of getting involved in a 
very lengthy discussion that would have to deal with specialized 
knowledge of parts of speech, parts of sentence, phrase structure, 
and syntactic analysis,I would suggest a revision of the sentence in 
the order mentioned above, thus eliminating the student’s confusion.

Such approach with students whose knowledge of grammar is at a 
beginner or intermediate undergraduate level seems to me much better 
than getting them into grammar intricacies which are far above their 
knowledge, and are difficult even to the grammarians on this forum. 


Regards,

Eduard  



On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, Edward Vavra wrote...

>Eduard,
>      Might I ask a little about your background and what you teach? 
My
>first reaction to your comments was that I thanked heaven I did not 
have
>you for a teacher. The impression I received is that you are super
>excessively focused on errors, finding them even where most members 
of
>this list probably would not. Would you really have commented on that
>"for" as an error in a student's paper?
>Thanks,
>Ed
> 
>
>
>>>> [log in to unmask] 3/1/2006 7:21:31 AM >>>
>
>Herb:
>
>Thank you! You are very nice to me.
>
>Eduard 
>
>
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