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”
| Word | LTotal | L4 | L3 | L2 | L1 | Total | R1 | R2 | R3 | R4 | RTotal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| people | 136 | 42 | 43 | 46 | 5 | 2992 | 2240 | 334 | 180 | 102 | 2856 |
| things | 56 | 20 | 16 | 15 | 5 | 1164 | 745 | 279 | 52 | 32 | 1108 |
| years | 96 | 25 | 42 | 23 | 6 | 1026 | 855 | 22 | 18 | 35 | 930 |
| times | 53 | 9 | 14 | 26 | 4 | 822 | 734 | 20 | 5 | 10 | 769 |
| ways | 20 | 3 | 9 | 4 | 4 | 616 | 472 | 110 | 7 | 7 | 596 |
| different | 39 | 12 | 17 | 10 | 612 | 540 | 5 | 19 | 9 | 573 | |
| see | 438 | 35 | 25 | 49 | 329 | 517 | 4 | 12 | 21 | 42 | 79 |
| others | 29 | 3 | 16 | 8 | 2 | 511 | 458 | 5 | 15 | 4 | 482 |
| just | 262 | 70 | 39 | 56 | 97 | 430 | 10 | 35 | 69 | 54 | 168 |
| great | 114 | 34 | 66 | 14 | 371 | 192 | 24 | 22 | 19 | 257 |
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.