ADJ (of) a -- whe re's the plural?

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:22 PM -0400 4/16/04, Steve Boatti wrote:
>In a message dated 4/16/04 9:28:53 PM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
>
>>  Actually, you can *say* "They're [tu:] good shooters", but only for
>>  "two", not "too".
>>
>
>Perhaps someone can explain to me, a non-linguist, just why you can't say
>"they're too good shooters."

I don't think being a linguist or not enters into it.  If you can say
it, you can say it, and I can't explain why you can't.

>It is perfectly grammatical and doesn't sound
>strange to me at all.
>
Hmm.  Looks like there's a "dialect split" here.

Can you also get "How good shooters are they?" as the plural of "How
good a shooter is he?"  Also, I'm assuming you (and I mean you, not
one) can't say "They're two good of shooters" or "How good of
shooters are they?", right?  For me, the version without "of" is
pretty much as bad as the version with "of".  I'm assuming you have a
difference between the "of" and the non-"of" versions.

Larry