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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