THE QUANTIFIERS

Quantifiers are adjectives and adjectival phrases that give approximate answers to the questions "How much?" and "How many?"

Examples

I've got a little money. 
I've got a lot of friends.

·         Numbers: Ordinal and Cardinal, percentages

·         Quantifiers with countable and uncountable nouns

·         A few and few, a little and little

·         Some and any

·         Compound nouns made with SOME, ANY and NO

·         Graded Quantifiers

·         Enough + Noun

THE QUANTIFIERS

Quantifiers with countable and uncountable nouns

Adjectives and adjectival phrases that describe quantity are shown below. Some can only go withcountable nouns (friends, cups, people), and some can only go with uncountable nouns (sugar, tea, money, advice). The words in the middle column can be used with both countable and uncountable nouns.

Only with uncountable nouns	With uncountable and countable nouns	Only with countable nouns
How much?	How much? or How many?	How many?
a little	no/none	a few
a bit (of)	not any	a number (of)
-	some (any)	several
a great deal of	a lot of	a large number of
a large amount of	plenty of	a great number of
-	lots of	-
+ noun

Note: much and many are used in negative and question forms.

Examples

·         How much money have you got?

·         How many cigarettes have you smoked?

·          There's not much sugar in the cupboard.

·          There weren't many people at the concert.

They are also used with too, (not) so, and (not) as :There were too many people at the concert - we couldn't see the band.
It's a problem when there are so many people.
There's not so much work to do this week.
In positive statements, we use a lot of:

Examples

·         I've got a lot of work this week.

·         There were a lot of people at the concert.

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A few and few, a little and little

These expressions show the speaker's attitude towards the quantity he/she is referring to.

A few (for countable nouns) and a little (for uncountable nouns) describe the quantity in apositive way:

Examples

·         "I've got a few friends" (= maybe not many, but enough)

·         "I've got a little money" (= I've got enough to live on)

Few and little describe the quantity in a negative way:

Examples

·         Few people visited him in hospital (= he had almost no visitors)

·         He had little money (= almost no money)

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