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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