Parts of speech of "for"

Question

Ok, I have this snooty math teacher that is constantly correcting people's grammar skills.  It's funny at times in an annoying way.  Anyways, I had vocabulary words up in my class and I had the word "target", with the definition "something you aim for".  Now he brought up the point that I ended the phrase with a preposition, which is entirely true.  After explaining that it was informal English, "shorthand", in other words, I explained to him that in the sentence, "for" could not be considered a preposition because it did not have an object following it.  Therefore, it had to be considered an adverb.  I then looked up the word in the dictionary and was surprised to see that it was listed as a preposition and a conjunction, but not an adverb.  So who's right, the dictionary or myself?

Clive · Accepted Answer

Hi,
Ok, I have this snooty math teacher that is constantly correcting people's grammar skills. It's funny at times in an annoying way. Anyways, I had vocabulary words up in my class and I had the word "target", with the definition "something you aim for". Now he brought up the point that I ended the phrase with a preposition, which is entirely true. After explaining that it was informal English, "shorthand", in other words, I explained to him that in the sentence, "for" could not be considered a preposition because it did not have an object following it. Therefore, it had to be considered an adverb. I then looked up the word in the dictionary and was surprised to see that it was listed as a preposition and a conjunction, but not an adverb. So who's right, the dictionary or myself?

The dictionary. In your example, i'for' is a preposition.

You would do better to challenge your math teacher's idea that you should never end a sentence with a preposition.
Many knowledgeable people do not accept this so-called rule.
Winston Churchill is supposed to have made fun of this rule by saying
"This is the sort of English up with which I will not put"
in order, jokingly, to avoid saying the obviously more reasonable
"This is the sort of English which I will not put up with."

Ask your math teacher which of these two sentences he prefers.

Good luck, Clive

CalifJim · Answer

"for" is a preposition. It is displaced in that expression, which is a variant of "something that you aim for", that is, "you aim for something". "something" is the object of the preposition.
The injunction against ending a sentence with a preposition went out about a million years ago.

The most respected authors in the English language have been ending sentences with prepositions for a long, long time.
I'm surprised your teacher doesn't know that.
CJ

Parts of speech of "for"

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