As to: Compound preposition
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Chapters
00:00 As To: Compound Preposition
00:58 Answer 1 Score 0
01:18 Accepted Answer Score 0
02:10 Thank you
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Full question
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Tags
#grammar #prepositions
#avk47
ANSWER 1
Score 0
These are semantically equivalent:
"He was uncertain which road to take."
"He was uncertain about the road to take."
The phrase as to in the context of your sentence is equivalent to about.
I would not break the phrase down further.
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 0
I think the only answer to this question is idiomatically. Small words typically have many meanings, and serve as several parts of speech. Consider to act as leader(preposition, meaning "in the role of") As she was bored, she left (conjunction, meaning "because"). And there are lots more.
When you say, "How do they "converge" into such meaning?" you seem to expect that it should be possible to disassemble this two word phrase into its component parts in a way that preserves their meaning individually. As it states in this article on idioms, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom
The manner in which units of meaning are assigned to units of syntax remains unclear. This problem has motivated a tremendous amount of discussion and debate in linguistics circles and it is a primary motivator behind the Construction Grammar framework.