Craig: "For" is redundant in the debated example. It is not needed. The propositional meaning of the sentence is still preserved without it. Because grammaticality includes economy of expression, a statement that defines "He worked for as long as he could" as "perfectly grammatical" does not reflect grammatical reality. Your example, "He painted the lines [for] as long as he could," is an ambiguous syntactic structure and I would recommend to my student to revise it. Eduard On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Craig Hancock wrote... >Eduard, > When you say your native speaker students generate 70% ungrammatical >sentences, you are probably using the term in a rather unique way. > "He worked for as long as he could" strikes me as perfectly >grammatical, as something I would easily say and easily understand. We >would need a corpus to include it, but we would need a corpus to >classify it as ungrammatical as well. > > I gave one example where "for" helps clarify, and I'll try another.=20 >"He painted the lines [for] as long as he could." Without the "for", >it's a statement about the length of the lines. With the "for", it's a >statement about how long he would work. The "for" makes the notion of >duration clear. >If it showed up in my students' writing, I would never think of it as >ungrammatical. > >Craig 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/