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The ‘time‘- away construction, exemplified by We slept the whole afternoon away , proves to have a complex set of syntactic and semantic properties. In particular, the NP the whole afternoon behaves syntactically like a direct object, even though it is clearly not licensed by the verb sleep . This construction is shown to be distinct from two others that it superficially resembles, the resultative and the way-construction. It is also compared with a number of other semi-idiomatic VP constructions. Two approaches for licensing the NP object are compared: a lexical rule approach, in which sleep away is treated as a complex verb that licenses the object, and a constructional approach, in which V NP away is listed as a meaning-bearing construction that licenses both the verb and the object.
Ray Jackendoff (Mon,) studied this question.