Learn English – “For all” vs. “with all”

collocationsprepositions

These examples are taken from the MacMillan Dictionary:

1. For all his complaining, I think he actually enjoyed the day.

2. For all the trouble he's caused her, you'd think she'd be happy to see him go.

3. With all this uncertainty about jobs, it's difficult to make plans.

4. With all its faults, democracy is still the best system we have.

Are these "with all" fixed collocations?

And I'm wondering whether "with all" has a broader scope of meaning than "for all" does as I think "for all" in the first two examples could be easily substituted with "with all".

Best Answer

Consider "for all + noun/noun group" at the beginning of a sentence as an idiom and a colloquial variant for the preposition "despite".

In "with all + noun/noun group" "with" has its basic meaning.

Sometimes there is not much difference between the two, but sometimes they are of opposite meaning as in

1 - Mother about her son's room: with all his books in his room it's difficult for me to clean up.

2 - Welcome back. With all your absence it was a loss on this site.

If you put in "For all" 1 and 2 make no sense.

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