Paul, Phil,

    If it's elliptical, would that extend to similar constructions, such
as "as high as he could", "as low as he could", "as sharply as he
could", and so on?
    In these cases, the ellipsis is clearly of a repetition of the verb as
well as possibly a noun or prepositional phrase modifier.  "He worked
for as long [in time] as he could work." "He jumped as high [in space]
as he could jump" and so on.  I suppose there's nothing to keep us
from imagining a double ellipsis in some of these cases. One way or
another, we want the listener/reader to fill in the missing meaning
from context.
   How about this one for ambiguity:  "He made the hot dogs as long as he
could.">Here, we would need the "for" to make duration clear. The
ellipsed meaning in the ambiguous example could be either of duration
or size. (He would make them longer than two feet, but wasn't able to. 
He would make them longer than an hour, but wasn't up to it.)
    The hang-up, I think, is that we want to classify "for" as a
preposition and want to say adverbs can't be objects of preposition.
Ellipsis seems the neat, clean way. But maybe language isn't as neat
and clean as we want it to be for the purposes of analysis. Exceptions
don't derail rules. A functional explanation might be that "for" helps
us make a statement less ambigious. It serves a palpable purpose,
however we might classify it.
    A neat problem.

Craig

I didn't see this message before I sent my similar comment about the idea
> being eliptical. Please disregard my redundancy!
>
>   Thanks,
>
>   Paul D.
>
> Phil Bralich <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>   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"
>>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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