Learn English – “How long was spent on the job?” – a grammatical parse of its subject

interrogativesparts-of-speechsyntax

In a grammar discussion, this following example sentence came up:

  1. "How long was spent on the job?"

Question #1: Would that sentence be acceptable as standard English to you? (AmE? BrE? etc.)

Question #2: And how would you parse its subject "How long"? And would you consider the subject to be:

  • a noun phrase (NP)
  • an adjective phrase (AdjP)
  • an adverb phrase (AdvP)
  • other

Question #3: And what word categories would the words "how" and "long" in that subject belong to?

Best Answer

(Native American English speaker here.)

Question #1

Yes, though it looks weird to me about 10% of the time. A little priming can overcome the weirdness:

"How much was spent on the job?"

"$128,400, sir."

"And how long was spent on the job?"

Question #2

I think the grammar is ambiguous in a way that doesn't matter.

  1. You could understand how long as an adverb phrase, if you think of spending (time) as an action modified by how long it takes.

  2. You could understand how long as an adjective phrase, if you think that spend has an implied object, time, and the question asks its length.

  3. You could understand how long as a noun phrase, for a couple reasons. First, every English sentence needs a subject, and it's hard to find a better candidate for the subject of this sentence than how long. Second, the expected answer is something like "Five hours were spent on the job." Five hours is unmistakably a noun phrase. In the question, how long is the placeholder that gets filled in by five hours in the answer.

So, you could say that how long "must" be a noun phrase since it occupies the slot filled in by a noun phrase in the answer, and it's the subject, or you could say it's a fill-in-the-blank adjective or adverb that stands in for a subject in the question, and gets filled in by a noun phrase that will be the subject in the answer.

There is a school of thought in linguistics* which requires that questions like this have a definite answer. Within this school of thought, different scientific theories of grammar are tested by their ability to supply crisp, mathematical categories to answer your question, which figure into purely syntactic rules that determine all possible English utterances. A theory would have to be rejected if its categories and rules disallow an utterance that native speakers find acceptable, or allow an utterance that native speakers find unacceptable. If it didn't even have an answer, it would scarcely count as a theory. I think this question suggests that all of those theories are wrong about something important, though they've certainly got some very important truth to them. What I think is wrong is the expectation of mathematical crispness.

Here's another way to look at "How long was spent on the job?" The meaning plus familiar phrases, familiar syntactic forms, and who-knows-how-many other psychological pressures make different kinds of answers easier or harder to think of and to hear as addressing the question. To illustrate, here are some more possible answers:

  • "Too long!" That seems to be an adjective phrase, but let's not go there. It's a familiar phrase, and its meaning is easy to make sense of in context. By echoing the word long, it seems to plug nicely into the original sentence. The rhythm perfectly matches how long. Echoing is a very important psychological pressure, which can lead a person to overlook the fact that other expectations about an answer weren't satisfied. Finally, spend too long is a familiar phrase, so this is a very reasonable answer.

  • "Too much!" sort of means the same thing, but isn't satisfying. How long in combination with spend asks for an amount of time, but spend too much suggests money rather than time, so the listener wonders if you're answering a different question.

  • "Too much time" and "too many hours" sort of work, but they're somewhat unsatisfying even though they directly answer the question and they work with spend. How long has a stereotyped answer: a measurement with units. The analogy with measurements of (spatial) length exerts some pressure. Neither of these answers delivers a measurement with units, so they're a little hard to hear as answers to the question--even though by general grammatical rules, not customs specific to the familiar phrase how long, both are unobjectionable.

So, my answer is: other, but not completely contradicting any of the first three options.

Question #3

Three-letter word and four-letter word. OK, OK, I'm sure that's not what you meant by "word categories". Adverb and adjective. If you really want to, you could say that how long is a noun phrase made of an adverb and an adjective.

* I don't want to blame this too strongly on Noam Chomsky, since many people think this way and thought this way long before him, and many people disagree with him about various details even as they subscribe to the theory that all grammar consists of mathematically crisp syntactic categories and rules.

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