Where is the missing prepositional object?

Question

With a weaksocial-safety net, little support is in place for when families fail to help those living alone.

the object after for is understood, but is it grammatical?

Thank you in advance for the answer.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

The sentence, "With a weak social safety net, little support is in place for when families fail to help those living alone." is acceptable grammatically. Grammatically the sentence can be looked at in a number of ways:

1. The word "for" is idiomatic-like and is included to make the speech more "folksy-sounding." It can be omitted with no change in meaning: "With a weak social safety net, little support is in place when families fail to help those living alone."

2. The sentence is elliptical and there are words omitted for brevity: "With a weak social safety net, little support is in place for a single person when families fail to help those living alone." The words "a single person" are omitted for the sake of brevity and are understood from the context.

3. The group of words "when families fail to help those living alone" functions as a noun and therefore can be the object of the preposition "for." To see this more clearly replace "when families...living alone" with the approximately equivalent word "emergencies." Then you have the sentence: "With a weak social safety net, little support is in place for emergencies."

Anonymous · Answer

It is grammatical, but the complement of for isn’t missing. It’s right here: for when families fail to help those living alone.

Where is the missing prepositional object?

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