Can "such ... as" be used to introduce a clause

Question

Recently I'm learning the usage of the word "such". I looked up several dictionaries and found that in Collins Dictionary, one sense of "such" has the following usage:

You use such...as to link something or someone with a clause in which you give a description of the kind of thing or person that you mean.

Each member of the alliance agrees to take such action as it deems necessary.
Britain is not enjoying such prosperity as it was in the mid-1980s.

Such as is also used.

Children do not use inflections such as are used in mature adult speech.

However, I didn't see this in other dictionaries like Oxford Learner's Dictionaries and Longman Dictionary. Can "such" be used like this? If so, is this sentence correct: He is such a person as for everyone in the class his name is known.

Answer 1

Interesting set of 3 examples.

I think of (1) as "legal English", because it is the sort of English you find on legal documents. Phrases like "such action as it deems necessary" are rare in speech, but you find that kind of construction a lot in legal documents. When writing something with legal effect, you must remove all the ambiguity that you can, define your words or refer to their definitions, be much more careful about pronoun antecedents than speakers normally are, etc., and it makes the speech a little "stilted" and prone to (ahem) such phrases as those. 8>)

(2) might be natural in some form of British English, but it sounds awkward for the US. I think a smoother way to write this would be "Britain is not enjoying the prosperity that it was in the mid-1980s." I suppose that could be "such as it was ...".

I think your own example is twisted by trying to find a use for "such". In the US, at least, we would not use it this way; much more likely is "He is the kind of person that everyone in the class knows his name." You could find such this way -- "There are some people who everyone in a class remembers their name -- he is such a person."

Answer 2

The example you provide doesn't use such … as in the same sense as those you've looked at.

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The example sentences could be paraphrased in the following way, changing their meaning slightly:

• Each member of the alliance agrees to take action that is deemed necessary.
• Britain is not enjoying the same prosperity it was in the mid-1980s.
• Children do not use inflections that are used in mature adult speech.

Note how these all form a single independent clause.

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However, the example sentence you provided can't be paraphrased in that way.

Instead, it has a different meaning, which is captured by a different type of rephrasing:

• He is such a person, because for everyone in the class his name is known.

This is actually two independent clauses. In the rephrased version I used because, but in the original, it's as that was used.

In other words, the use of such … as in the last example isn't being used as an adjectival phrase, but such and as are simply individual words that aren't related to each other specifically.

Such is acting on its own as an adjective, and as is acting on its own as a conjunction.

It's not wrong, but it's not using such … as in the same sense that the others are.