much fewer

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

elizabeth zwicky has just sent me the following from e-mail she'd
received:
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> But if the equipment is leased, you have much fewer freedoms as to
> what you can do with it.
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this is from a native speaker of english (though admittedly currently
living in francophone belgium).

a google web search throws up, omigod, ca. 100k examples, most of
them apparently relevant, among them:
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Use much fewer observable predicates than the training set ... There
are much
fewer simple hypotheses than complex ones, hence the hypothesis space
is ...
ai.stanford.edu/~latombe/cs121/2005/O-decision-tree.ppt
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... and more focused on women's pleasure, showing different views of
orgasms and much fewer close-ups of penetration or fellatio than
mainstream porn. ...
www.goodforher.com/osc/catalog/index.php?cPath=3_40_117
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The protest on Sunday drew only hundreds of people, much fewer than
similar
rallies recently, showing some people might have given up hope for
democracy ... gallery.muzi.com/pfg/english/1000154.shtml
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... that he thought libraries will not cease to exist in a networked
environment,
but they may be much fewer in number and staffed with much fewer
people. ...
www.infomotions.com/musings/wils-world/
-----

the last two cites could have had "much smaller" instead of "much
fewer", and this is a possible source of the collocation (as, maybe,
a blend of "many fewer" and "much smaller"), which then spread to
other contexts.  or "much" could be chosen instead of "many" to avoid
the superficial oxymoron of "many fewer".  or, most likely to my
mind, the writer could have been aiming for "much less" (with the
widespread "less" instead of "fewer" with plural count nouns; "much"
rather than "more" is then appropriate to combine with "less"), but
then corrected the "less" to the formally correct "fewer", without
changing the degree modifier as well: that is, a kind of blend
between "much less" and "many fewer".

anyone studied this?  it seems not to be in MWDEU or Brians, and i'm
away from the rest of my sources.

arnold