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 -----Original Message----- From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of ATEG automatic digest system Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 12:01 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: ATEG Digest - 25 Mar 2008 to 26 Mar 2008 (#2008-77) There are 3 messages totalling 1098 lines in this issue. Topics of the day: 1. Because of vs. due to (3) 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/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:08:03 -0400 From: "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Because of vs. due to This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------_=_NextPart_001_01C88F85.854B8ECD Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable 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. ********************************************************** 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/