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I have a question about the usage of the preposition "for" here:
Stanford students stand out for their academic excellence.
How is the above sentence different if "for" is replaced with "because of":
Stanford students stand out because of their academic excellence.
?
Also, could I write:
They arrived late for the heavy traffic.
to mean:
They arrived late because of the heavy traffic.
?
In your first pair of examples, for and because of are equivalent semantically, unambivalent, and correct grammatically.
However, in your second pair, the second option is preferable
This is because in the first option
there is a subtle ambiguity in the meaning of "for": We resolve it because we understand "heavy traffic" as something that can cause someone to be late. So we assume this is the "because of" sense of for, as in "You can't see the forest for the trees".
But if you didn't know that "heavy traffic" is undesirable, you might parse it as:
To better see how much this depends on the meaning of the NP that follows "for" (i.e., "heavy traffic"), we need only replace "heavy traffic" (a known hindrance) with a desirable event:
We have no problem understanding that either. It means they were going to the party, and did not arrive on time. Of course, this is a different sense of "for". But it's the same syntax!
Now if we try to replace for with because of, look what happens:
Now we are not saying that they arrived late at the party; we are saying that they arrived late at some later, unnamed event, because they had been at the party.
So yes, there are cases where you cannot replace "for" with "because of".
(And there are cases where you not only could, but ought to)
Your second pair of examples are actually that type of case, syntactically—it is only semantics that allows a native speaker to discern the intended sense of "for".
Suppose we phrase it this way:
This is unambiguous, though it would be considered quaint or overly formal (in AmE).
But if we rephrase this same idea, in the simpler and more idiomatic style below,
we see a clear distinction between the usage of "for" and "because of". You could NOT replace for with because of; nor could you replace because of with for.
The meaning doesn't change when you substitute because of. In fact, because of is listed as a definition of for. For example, see Collins' (sense 11).
It is possible that people will prefer the sentence with because of because it seems more direct, and perhaps because it seems clearer. There might also be a perception that using this meaning of for is archaic.
However, no native English speaker would have difficulty understanding either sentence.
