I would treat "way" as the head of the noun phrase and "he used to" as a
reduced relative clause.  It's an asyndetic relative, that is, there is
no relative pronoun or subordinating conjunction "that".

Herb


Subject: Explaining "A WAY"

Fellow Linguists and Other Fond Folks,

Look at the following sentences:

                                           1. He looks like he used to.
                                           2. He looks the way he used
to.

How would you label the phrase "the way" in sentence 2? Is it a
subordinator? It seems to function that way, much as "like" does in the
first sentence.

Your turn.

Marshall Myers

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