Ditto on the NP analysis, but what's notable to my mind is that "look"
doesn't typically take an NP predicate complement in American
English--it's almost always an adjective phrase (look happy, etc.) or a
PP. The only other structurally equivalent examples I can come up with
are "look your age" and "look yourself" (as in "you don't look yourself
today"), both idiomatic expressions. Other examples with NP's have a
distinctly British ring to my ear (as in, "I must look a total fool"),
and would almost certainly have 'like' in American usage.

Karl Hagen
Department of English
Mount St. Mary's College

Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:

>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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