W dniu 2014-03-09 09:48, Kumara Bhikkhu pisze: > Marcin Miłkowski wrote thus at 07:22 PM 08-03-14: >> Maybe a pattern for inflected plural "be" + "more or less" >> would do it in this case. Indeed, there are multiple cases of this. > > Yes, but it's safer to create an exception for all cases of "more or less".
Not really. Actually, you can make a mistake, thinking that you can buy more or less cars, for example. > > Besides, speaking for descriptive grammar, "less" > is now widely used for both countable and > uncountable nouns. "Fewer" is hardly used at all. Not really. Run "fewer" + plural noun in GloWbE, and then "less" + plural noun, and see how many of that are verbs (wrongly recognized as nouns): http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/ less + plural noun: 5000 matches fewer + plural noun: 10300 matches GloWbE is global English, so it includes variations from Hong Kong or India, etc., so this is the most liberal corpus to test the rules. And still, less + plural noun is less used than "fewer". In TIME magazine corpus, the ratio is definitely in favor of fewer. But arguably, "less taxes" and "less resources" could be made exceptions to the rule, as both are used consistently as uncountable plurals, however weird this may sound. Regards, Marcin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subversion Kills Productivity. Get off Subversion & Make the Move to Perforce. With Perforce, you get hassle-free workflows. Merge that actually works. Faster operations. Version large binaries. Built-in WAN optimization and the freedom to use Git, Perforce or both. Make the move to Perforce. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=122218951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Languagetool-devel mailing list Languagetool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/languagetool-devel
