determiner + noun (range) – English Grammar Profiler

A2 point 18 in the category of NOUNS/phrases is defined:

form simple noun phrases by pre-modifying nouns with an increasing range of determiners.

From the EGP examples, we write a search code in iWeb corpus for:

too|so much|many _NN

1 SO MANY PEOPLE 96105 2 SO MUCH FUN 51051 3 TOO MUCH TIME 39565 4 SO MANY THINGS 39094 5 SO MUCH TIME 32315 6 SO MANY TIMES 29999 7 TOO MANY PEOPLE 29665 8 SO MANY WAYS 27333 9 SO MANY YEARS 23776 10 TOO MANY TIMES 14542 11 SO MUCH MONEY 13915 12 SO MANY OTHERS 13447 13 TOO MUCH MONEY 12901 14 SO MANY OPTIONS 12040 15 TOO MUCH TROUBLE 10270 16 TOO MUCH WORK 9680 17 TOO MUCH PRESSURE 8394 18 TOO MUCH INFORMATION 8108 19 TOO MUCH WATER 7879 20 SO MANY QUESTIONS 7508 21 TOO MANY THINGS 7464 22 SO MUCH INFORMATION 7132 23 SO MANY REASONS 5722 24 TOO MUCH ATTENTION 5713 25 TOO MUCH POWER 5665 26 SO MUCH PAIN 5629 27 SO MANY LEVELS 5619 28 TOO MUCH WEIGHT 5280 29 TOO MUCH SPACE 5247 30 SO MANY WOMEN 4915 31 SO MANY PLACES 4847 32 SO MUCH WORK 4796 33 TOO MUCH EFFORT 4615 34 TOO MUCH DETAIL 4594 35 SO MUCH ATTENTION 4533 36 SO MUCH TROUBLE 4465 37 TOO MUCH FUN 4404 38 TOO MUCH SUGAR 4347 39 SO MUCH LOVE 4319 40 SO MUCH ENERGY 4285 41 SO MANY COMPLIMENTS 4205 42 SO MANY CHOICES 4110 43 SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES 4025 44 SO MUCH POTENTIAL 3816 45 SO MANY VARIABLES 3718 46 SO MANY PROBLEMS 3610 47 TOO MANY VARIABLES 3587 48 SO MUCH STUFF 3468 49 TOO MUCH EMPHASIS 3447 50 SO MANY FACTORS 3424 51 SO MANY HOURS 3417 52 SO MUCH SENSE 3411 53 SO MUCH EFFORT 3407 54 TOO MUCH STRESS 3395 55 SO MUCH JOY 3214 56 SO MANY POSSIBILITIES 3184 57 TOO MUCH HEAT 3145 58 SO MUCH POWER 3111 59 TOO MANY QUESTIONS 3111 60 TOO MUCH ALCOHOL 3056 61 TOO MUCH STUFF 2986 62 SO MUCH PRESSURE 2951 63 TOO MANY YEARS 2915 64 SO MANY COMPANIES 2911 65 SO MANY IDEAS 2890 66 TOO MUCH DAMAGE 2768 67 SO MANY BENEFITS 2717 68 SO MANY STORIES 2664 69 SO MANY WORDS 2659 70 TOO MANY OPTIONS 2612 71 SO MANY CHILDREN 2610 72 TOO MUCH SALT 2566 73 SO MUCH SPACE 2544 74 SO MANY MEMORIES 2517 75 SO MANY LIVES 2504 76 SO MANY FRIENDS 2503 77 SO MANY STUDENTS 2500 78 TOO MUCH NOISE 2485 79 TOO MUCH FOOD 2450 80 SO MANY PLAYERS 2427 81 TOO MUCH ENERGY 2418 82 TOO MANY PROBLEMS 2401 83 SO MANY GAMES 2334 84 SO MANY MEN 2283 85 SO MANY ASPECTS 2258 86 SO MANY KIDS 2256 87 TOO MUCH CREDIT 2225 88 TOO MUCH ROOM 2223 89 SO MANY ISSUES 2193 90 SO MANY AREAS 2184 91 TOO MUCH OIL 2138 92 TOO MUCH SUN 2080 93 SO MUCH WEIGHT 2073 94 SO MUCH HISTORY 1998 95 SO MANY PRODUCTS 1957 96 SO MUCH ROOM 1919 97 SO MANY USES 1910 98 SO MANY FAMILIES 1895 99 SO MUCH WATER 1871

100 SO MANY FEATURES 1868

Determiners can be joined with adverbs to describe quantities of countable plural nouns.

Unfortunately, iWeb corpus doesn’t allow us to search for “so many” + collocates. As a result, we can refine our investigation at WebCorp LSE which allows much more wild card searching. It is, however a bit small and uses a different coding system. Looking for “so many” as an adverb and determiner produces almost nothing. As a result, just a search for “so many” with no coding attached shows that they have it coded as an adverb + adjective. Regardless, we can get some useful collocate data without stopwords (words which are the most common top hundred or so) to get data like this:

External Collocates for “so many”

This data basically shows us that the most common word is “people” directly after our phrase, as in “so many people” or on the left the verb “see” as in “see so many“. The tagger on Webcorp has “many as an adjective. And we also know that “many” can be a pronoun. We might then be losing our attempt to find adverbs modifying degree.