Dear Ed: If you remember, this thread began with a call for help. A student was confused about the grammatical structure of the sentence *He worked for as long as he could.* In particular, the question was: Is *for as long as* a prepositional phrase, or an adverbial phrase? The confusion was coming from the fact that the sentence component *for as long as*” was beginning with a preposition, which is typical of prepositional phrases, but had no noun head, which is rather untypical of prepositional phrases. So, what was the solution to the problem? After two weeks of e-mail exchanges which seemed to increase the confusion rather than eliminate it, I proposed that the sentence *He worked for as long as he could* was rather anomalous, and that the preposition *for* was redundant. I also suggested a revision of the sentence into *He worked as long as he could.* Such a revision would make the grammatical analysis of the sentence much simpler. After I had produced a few tree structures of the sentence, I came to the conclusion that the syntactic structure in question was a complex sentence composed of a main clause, *He worked,* and a subordinate clause *He could (work),* linked through a complex subordinating adverb, *as long as.* I believe that this is the best solution to the problem related to the syntactic structure in question. My students come very seldom to me with difficult grammar questions, and I ignore *grammatical anomalies* of this kind which appear in their essays. But if one of them came to me, confused by a syntactic structure such as the one above, instead of getting involved in a very lengthy discussion that would have to deal with specialized knowledge of parts of speech, parts of sentence, phrase structure, and syntactic analysis,I would suggest a revision of the sentence in the order mentioned above, thus eliminating the student’s confusion. Such approach with students whose knowledge of grammar is at a beginner or intermediate undergraduate level seems to me much better than getting them into grammar intricacies which are far above their knowledge, and are difficult even to the grammarians on this forum. Regards, Eduard On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, Edward Vavra wrote... >Eduard, > Might I ask a little about your background and what you teach? My >first reaction to your comments was that I thanked heaven I did not have >you for a teacher. The impression I received is that you are super >excessively focused on errors, finding them even where most members of >this list probably would not. Would you really have commented on that >"for" as an error in a student's paper? >Thanks, >Ed > > > >>>> [log in to unmask] 3/1/2006 7:21:31 AM >>> > >Herb: > >Thank you! You are very nice to me. > >Eduard > > >To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: > http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html >and select "Join or leave the list" > >Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ > To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/