One of my students asked me what to do with the following sentence:
He worked for as long as he could.
Now, "as long as he could" is, I think pretty clearly an adverbial
phrase, containing in itself a comparative clause with deletions. The
question is, what do you do with the "for"? I understand that it can
be omitted--and then the analysis is easier. But I would not want to
say that an adverbial phrase can be a complement/object of a
preposition. Is "for" a preposition here? Is it a particle? Do I just
throw up my hands and call it an idiom?
How do other people see this?
Kathleen Ward
UC Davis
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