Eduard,
Could you define more clearly what you mean by "grammatical sentence"?
The term is defined formally among generative linguists as any sentence
generated by the grammar. Informally, this has generally been taken to
mean any sentence identified by a native speaker as grammatical. There
is, granted, a certain circularity to the relationship between theory
and method here. Prescriptively a grammatical sentence would be one
that is devoid of what a particular instantiation of prescriptive
grammar defines as grammatical error. In general, I'd have to say that
the notion "grammatical sentence" is at best fuzzy. The use of a corpus
probably wouldn't help us to sharpen the focus any, since that would
simply be a large collection of sentences found in actual texts. Their
grammaticality is rarely an issue in a corpus. A good example of this
is Sidney Greenbaum's _The Oxford English Grammar_, based on the ICE-GB
and Wall Street Journal corpora. My students have found some of his
examples, mostly taken from these corpora, to be of questionable
grammaticality.
So on what basis are you judging either form of the sentence under
discussion as grammatical or ungrammatical? By the way, I find them
both grammatical--on either of the fuzzy criteria.
Herb
Eduard,
When you say your native speaker students generate 70% ungrammatical
sentences, you are probably using the term in a rather unique way.
"He worked for as long as he could" strikes me as perfectly
grammatical, as something I would easily say and easily understand. We
would need a corpus to include it, but we would need a corpus to
classify it as ungrammatical as well. >
I gave one example where "for" helps clarify, and I'll try another.
"He painted the lines [for] as long as he could." Without the "for",
it's a statement about the length of the lines. With the "for", it's a
statement about how long he would work. The "for" makes the notion of
duration clear.
If it showed up in my students' writing, I would never think of it as
ungrammatical.
Craig
Hi!
>
> I like Stephen Seagal's movies and I often look for smart lines in
> them. In "Under Siege 2" one of the characters says: "Assumption is
> the mother of all...mistakes."
>
> The lengthy grammatical analysis on this thread has been based on the
> assumption that the syntactic structure
>
> *He worked for as long as he could,
>
> is a grammatical sentence. We don't know the origin of the sentence,
> and we don't have its context. But what is the evidence that we are
> dealing with a grammatical sentence? "Native," or "nonnative"
> speakers of English generate all the time ungrammatical sentences. In
> fact, as an instructor of English, I find out that my "native"
> students generate an average of 70% of ungrammatical sentences in
> their essays.
>
> I believe that rewriting the sentence with the omission of "for"
> would make the analysis of the sentence much simpler. Why should we
> ignore "for"? Because we don't have any evidence (yet) that "for" has
> a high collocation frequency with "as long as." We would need to do
> some serious search in a few English language corpora in order to
> establish that the association "[for]+ as long as" is a frequent, and
> therefore natural, language collocation, and not an aberrant
> syntactic structure.
>
> So, let's rewrite the sentence with the omission of "for:"
>
> He worked as long as he could.
>
> All we have here now is a *complex sentence* with a main clause, "He
> worked," and a subordinate clause, "He could (work)," linked by a
> *complex adverbial subordinator of time* (See Celce-Murcia's "The
> Grammar Book").
>
> So, let me write again the sentence indicating its components:
>
> [He(Pronoun, Subject) worked (Verb, Simple Past, Predicate) -main
> clause] as long as (complex adverbial subordinator of time) [He
> (Pronoun, Subject) could (work - elided)/could work (Verb, Past
> Tense - Predicate) - subordinate clause].
>
> Simply, what we have here is a complex sentence composed of a main
> clause and a subordinate clause, and linked through a subordinator.
>
> Eduard
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, 27 Feb 2006, Edward Vavra wrote...
>
>>Having watched this thread developed, I'd like to note that Phil's
>>explanation is elegant. It is clear, and it does not require all the
>>grammatical apparatus that would make some of the other explanations
>>incomprehensible to most students.
>>Ed
>>
>>>>> [log in to unmask] 2/23/2006 3:16:33 PM >>>
>>
>>I think you need to take that phrase following "for" as an ellipsis
> for
>>"as long a time as he could" and the "for" as a standard
> preposition.
>>
>>This follows sentences like:
>>
>> He worked for two hours
>> he worked for two days
>>
>> *He worked for as short as was necessary
>> He worked for as short a time as was necessary
>> *He worked for as intensely as necessary
>>
>> He worked for as long as was necessary
>> He worked for as long a time as was necessary
>>
>> *He worked for as hard as he could
>>
>>The fact that this does not work with "short" or other adjectives
>>indicates it is exceptional in some way rather than systematic.
>>
>>Phil Bralich
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: "Kathleen M. Ward" <[log in to unmask]>
>>>Sent: Feb 23, 2006 11:53 AM
>>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>>Subject: "work for" plus adverb clause
>>>
>>>One of my students asked me what to do with the following sentence:
>>>
>>> He worked for as long as he could.
>>>
>>>Now, "as long as he could" is, I think pretty clearly an adverbial
>>>phrase, containing in itself a comparative clause with deletions.
> The
>>
>>>question is, what do you do with the "for"? I understand that it
> can
>>
>>>be omitted--and then the analysis is easier. But I would not want
> to
>>
>>>say that an adverbial phrase can be a complement/object of a
>>>preposition. Is "for" a preposition here? Is it a particle? Do I
>>just
>>>throw up my hands and call it an idiom?
>>>
>>>How do other people see this?
>>>
>>>Kathleen Ward
>>>UC Davis
>>>
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>>
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>>
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>
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