amount/number

[Jonathan Lighter]

It's been a long, long time since I heard anybody say "a large number of"
when they could get away with "a large amount of."  "Amount" seems regularly
to be used for "number" nowadays in speech in this and similar contexts

JL




On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Randy Alexander
<strangeguitars at gmail.com>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Randy Alexander <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      amount/number
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Rodney Huddleston just mentioned to me that in British English,
> "amount" is not generally used with count nouns.
>
> I see this in some usage guides on the web, like Brians:
> http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/amount.html
>
> I decided to see what I could find comparing COCA and BNC, and this is
> what I found:
>
> I tried this search: amount of *s.[n*]
>
> The syntax means "amount of" + any noun that ends in "s".  Of course
> there are some uncount nouns thrown in, but COCA gives 1244 hits (COCA
> is 385 million words).  BNC (100 million words) gives 371 hits, which
> times 3.85 is 1428.35.
>
> Then I tried this search: amount of *s.[*nn2*].
>
> This restricts it to plural nouns (which still contains some uncount
> plurals).  COCA gives 758 hits, and BNC gives 282 * 3.85 = 1085.7.
>
> According to this, it looks like in BrE, amount may cover counts more
> than in AmE.  One specific example is "amount of things".  COCA gives
> 14 hits, vs BNC's 8 * 3.85 = 30.8.
>
> I would like to know what people think of this.  Is the usage advice
> prescriptivist poppycock?  Do you use "amount" with count nouns?
>
> --
> Randy Alexander
> Jilin City, China
> My Manchu studies blog:
> http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org