On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:25:08 GMT, Pine <pine@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>He was fundamentally too much a man of strong convictions to be
>correctly described as open-minded.
>He was too much a man, and too much an unusual type of man.
>But he was too much a man of appetites, too painterly, not to
>recognize the value,both sensual and moral, of a gesture.
>In the above three sentences, does 'much' function as a determiner or
>an adverb?
In my Natural Language Parser programs I treat these words as
determiners:
a/an, the, this, that, these, those
They 'determine' number and/or position, and specificity/generality.
In the first 'much' sentence, to my mind the much is an adverb. An
adj can't be substituted, e.g. dark. The thing to remember about
adverbs is that they can usually be placed in a number of positions in
a sentence:
He ran down the road slowly.
'slowly' could be inserted in several places, and the same can be said
of 'too much'.
Sig:
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
-- Isaac Asimov
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