>I've noticed an increasing prevalence of what I call the dangling
>"as far as."  Instead of saying, "As far as _______ is concerned,"
>or "As far as _______ goes," It's just, "As far as ______," and then
>the rest of the sentence.  One of the attorneys for the prosecution
>in the O.J. Simpson case--I don't remember his name, but he questioned
>criminalists -- used the dangling "as far as."  For example:  "As far
>as the blood under Nicole Brown's fingernails, were you able to make a
>match?"
>
>Anyone else notice this phenomenon?

Apparently so.  There's a really good (though fairly technical)
article about it from a sociolinguistic viewpoint (the only viewpoint
that makes sense for such a variable phenomenon) in the latest issue
of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America.  It's
fascinating, and covers all the bases, with copious data.

(Found in the Table of Contents for _Language_, via WWW:
   http://semlab2.sbs.sunysb.edu/Language/language.html
 This URL in turn was found from the Linguist List, via WWW:
   http://www.ling.rochester.edu/linguist/contents.html
 Both are text-only, and accessible via lynx)

_Language_ Vol.71 No. 1 (March 1995)

"Syntactic variation and change in progress: Loss of the verbal 
 coda in topic-restricting 'as far as' constructions"

 by John R. Rickford, Thomas A. Wasow, Norma Mendoza-Denton 
  & Juli Espinoza, all of Stanford University
 
Abstract 

The construction 'as far as NP' is a common topic restrictor in modern
English, but its verbal coda ('goes/is concerned') is often omitted.
We examine potental constraints on this variation and find significant
effects for syntactic, phonological, discourse mode and social
variables.  The internal effects are also relevant to 'Heavy NP Shift'
and other weight-related phenomena.

Diachronic data on the 'as far as' construction, and the evidence of
synchronic age distributions and usage commentators, suggest that 
the verbless variant has become markedly more frequent in recent 
decades, allowing us a rare opportunity to study syntactic change in
progress.  In addition to documenting the nature of variation and
change in this construction, our study has larger implications for 
the study of syntax and sociolinguistic variation, and demonstrates 
the value of integrating methods from different linguistic subfields
(in this case, sociolinguistics and variation theory, historical 
linguistics, corpus linguistics, and syntax).

  --------------------------------------------
 -John Lawler                     More grammar
  Linguistics Program   University of Michigan
 "..and, who knows? Maybe the horse will sing."