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My Japanese student asked me to explain in detail the grammar in the following sentence. "Starting this fall, Sugi Pharmacy Co., headquartered in Obu, Aichi Prefecture, will offer seniors a new type of job contract in order to help its older employees keep fitter for longer as well as address the company’s manpower shortage."

Specifically, he wants to know about the grammar structure from "keep fitter for longer as well as address the company’s manpower shortage".

The student is not familiar with linguistic terms, which is why I hesitated to answer him during the lesson. Can someone please help me provide an easy to understand explanation?

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  • Does the as well as part interest him? – SovereignSun Jul 16 '17 at 14:04
  • Ah yeah, I asked him that and he said he wants to understand the grammar structure in the entire part of that sentence. So basically, yes, it does interest him. – Anna Jul 16 '17 at 14:27
  • "keep fitter for longer" is rather clunky. I think "stay fit longer* would be better. – user3169 Jul 16 '17 at 23:00
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I think that is a slightly problematic sentence. I would rewrite as follows:

"Starting this fall, Sugi Pharmacy Co. ... will offer seniors a new type of job contract in order to help its older employees keep fitter for longer as well as to address the company’s manpower shortage."

That is, the company will offer the new type of job contract
a) to help its older employees keep fitter for longer
as well as
b) to address the company’s manpower shortage

Both a) and b) are complements of in order.

Without the repeated infinitive marker to, one could take address the company's manpower shortage as paralleling "keep fitter".

This is more a question of information packaging than violation of a grammatical rule. The repeated to simply makes the parallelism clearer.

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  • What if they are compliments of in order to? Then the to before address isn't needed. – SovereignSun Jul 17 '17 at 5:42
  • in order for that suggestion to have merit, it would have to make things clearer, which it doesn't. – Tᴚoɯɐuo Jul 17 '17 at 10:50
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"Starting this fall, Sugi Pharmacy Co., headquartered in Obu, Aichi Prefecture, will offer seniors a new type of job contract in order to help its older employees keep fitter for longer as well as address the company’s manpower shortage."

"as well as" means "and also" and joins two do-what parts: keep fitter for longer and address the company's manpower shortage.

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