What for and sentence structure

By the way, it occurred to me that everyone involved in the entire selection process for Latvia was apparently unaware that their 2010 entrant to Eurovision was using noticeably poor sentence structure in her song.

So, just a heads up for anyone who, like the Latvian Eurovision committee, thinks you can start an English question with the phrase "what for":

You can't.

"What for" always splits on either side of the full question:

"What is this axe for?"
"What did you do that for?"
"What are we living for?"

It's a corruption of "for what purpose" or "for what reason". You could start a question with "for what reason" (in fact, if you wanted to be completely correct, you probably should start the question that way), but it would sound pretty dorky:

"For what reason are we living?"

Dorky though it may be, that would still sound miles better than "what for are we living?"

"For what reason are we living?" sounds overly formal and slightly unnatural in modern usage. "What for are we living?" is just wrong.

Where you get "what for" together at the beginning of a question is when it is the entire question.

"Can you see me in my office after lunch?"
"What for?"

You can't see them, but there are words between the "what" and "for" in that example. The response is short for "what do you want to see me for?" Or, to be extra formal and correct: "For what purpose would you like to see me?"

By rights, the question should really be "for what?"

"Can you see me in my office after lunch?"
"For what?"

But, in modern English colloquial usage, we tend to go with "what for" - you just can't start a sentence that way.

Why? Quite frankly, only Mr God knows why, but if you aren't sure how to use "what for", might I suggest that you simply don't? The single word "why" works just as well, and avoids all sorts of value judgements regarding correct grammatical structures.

"Why is this axe here?"
"Why did you do that?"
"Why are we living?"

Why, indeed?