almost all & very few – English Grammar Profiler

In the English Grammar Profile, B2 point 51 in the category of adverbs/phrases is defined as:

degree adverbs (‘almost’, ‘very’) to modify determiners.

Adverbs phrases can be put together with degree adverbs such as “almost” and “very” to modify determiners, such as “all” and “few”.

*.[RR] *.[DB]

After removing a few unrelated results to the intention of finding degrees, the search on iWeb for any general adverb tagged as RR next to any DB results in the following frequency sets:

“much all” is actually mostly “pretty much all” so quite an unexpected find here. Most importantly though, “almost all” is by far the most common of all and worthy of further collocation. A search on iWeb for collocates 4 slots either side of “almost all” with no codes added returns:

• 
• 
• 

“in almost all cases the” through Lancsbox

*.[RG] *.[DA2]

As we know taggers are not perfect and to see what “RG” the code for adverbs of degree finds instead of RR, we get the following frequency results: