How long for?

Not only can prepositional phrases tell us when something happened, they can also tell us how long a process took.

But Dad's only going to town for an hour.

That Eye, the Sky(1986)

But Dad's only going to town for two weeks.

But Dad's only going to town for the rest of the night.

Write your own variation, changing the duration.

Before we go on, try this mental exercise: look at the prepositional phrases above and move them to different positions in the sentence. Does the sentence still make sense? Does it still sound natural? Can you find any positions where it works?

You'll find you can sort-of move it around to a few positions, but it doesn't sound as natural unless you tweak some of the wording.

Prepositional phrases