Scott,
I'll have to think about this. What tests would distinguish an adjective with a prepositional phrase complement from a compound preposition? Certainly analytic semantics would be part of it, and "due to" as a preposition, as in
Due to his poor health, Jack withdrew from the competition.
is not analytic. "Due to" as an adjective + prepositional phrase is, as in
Your payment is due to the bank by Friday.
I'm not sure I like that latter "due to"; I'd probably use "at" instead of "to," but I don't think that's a matter of grammaticality.
"Due to" as adjective + complement can also be interrupted by an adverb:
Your payment is due today to the bank.
"Due to" as a preposition can be only if the adverb is an intensifier, as in the "due simply to" example discussed earlier.
On the topic of "of," this is a misspelling with a long history that is due to the phonetic identity of unstressed "of" and unstressed, reduced auxiliary "have." The earliest citation in the OED is
1814 J. H. REYNOLDS Safie 57, I never could of thought that force Could turn affection in its course.
More interesting is
1853 C. BRONTĖ Let. May in J. Barker Brontės (1994) xxv. 727 Had Thackeray owned a son grown or growing up,..would he of spoken in that light way of courses that lead to disgrace and the grave?
Granted, it's only in a letter, but the slip by Charlotte Bronte suggests the form was in common use in Britain at the time and the confusion was alive and well.
Herb
I have no problem sticking to 'due' as an adjective, normally following a
form of to be; when I find it otherwise (e.g., Due to the fact that because
he was late, he missed the train), I normally consider it poor English.
I heard an excellent explanation today for why college students might
consider 'of' a verb: the oral English "I would of come, had I been
invited."
Scott Catledge
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Topics of the day:
1. Because of vs. due to (3)
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Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:08:03 -0400
From: "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Because of vs. due to
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The students in one of my (college) grammar classes are starting to
analyze text from "naturally-occurring" sources (as opposed to textbook
examples) and bringing in sentences that stump them so we can discuss
them in class (and so I can repeatedly notice that English is weird,
which anyone who teaches grammar needs to be reminded of as often as
possible). A recent example involved a construction like the following
(something like this may have come up on the list before, but if so, it
was long enough ago that it's not in my saved folder; apologies if it is
indeed repetition):
=20
These problems were due simply to a lack of water in the
surrounding area.
=20
I could think of two analyses off the bat:
=20
(1) "due" is an adjective being modified by an infinitive
phrase (this is how I usually deal with "able to..." etc.
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