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A person used the phrase "there are so much better alternatives" when saying that there are significantly superior alternatives. This phrase is meant as an emphasized version of "there are much better alternatives." I don't know the formal rule, but the "so" seems to make the sentence sound off.

Victor Stone
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  • Perhaps the reason it sounds "weird" is because we only perceive "so" for its adverb category, while "much" and "better" have other well know functions and categories e.g. determinatives, adjectives etc. ... and adverbs do not occur in predicative complement (PC) function and only a very small number of adverbs license complements ... 'there' is the predicand and 'so much better alternatives' is the predicative complement (the ascriptive PC for the verb 'be', the PC gives a property ascribed to 'there'). – aesking Jan 23 '20 at 03:55
  • It seems to be a limitation of "so". There are sentences, with attributive adjective phrases including the word "very", which are grammatical but would be ungrammatical with "so": "There are very good alternatives" & "There are very much better alternatives" -- OK. "There are so good alternatives" & "There are so much better alternatives" -- not OK. Perhaps we deem *"There are so good alternatives" ungrammatical because we prefer the notion of "so" to be expressed by an adjective, which must thus be "such". But the OP's sentence needs "so much Adj". – Rosie F Jan 23 '20 at 10:17

2 Answers2

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It's grammatical, but it's a little bit of a garden-path sentence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence).

As you acknowledge, "there are much better alternatives" sounds normal and is grammatical. It's a dummy subject, "there", followed by the plural cupola, "are", followed by an adverb, "much", that modifies an adjective, "better", that modifies the noun "ideas."

Also grammatical, and also typical, is the sentence, "there are ideas that are much better." Here, instead of preceding the noun, the adjective phrase "much better" comes after. But it's equally valid and has an identical meaning.

Then, we could add an additional adverb to the adjective phrase, to end up with "there are ideas that are so much better." Still very typical and grammatical.

Now, we should be able to move the adjective phrase back in front of the noun: "there are so much better ideas." This should still be grammatical for the same reason that "there are much better ideas" is grammatical (the extra adverb shouldn't change anything syntactically).

The problem is that hearing or reading "there are so..." primes us to expect the next word to be "many." So when we encounter the "much," we have to reanalyze the sentence.

If you were to slow down the process of parsing the sentence, it would be something like:

  • "There" - OK, could be an adverb, could be a pronoun
  • "are" - ah, so it's "there are," a pronoun
  • "so" - adverb; the next word is either an adjective or an adverb; I bet it's "many"
  • "much" - whoops, that's not "many" and it's an adverb; the speaker made a mistake
  • "better" - huh? this should be the noun, that the adjective "many" is supposed to modify, but it's another adjective...
  • "ideas" - "so much better ideas"; Oh! they did mean to use an adverb; guess I was wrong.

It's unpleasant to have to reanalyze a sentence (try those staple garden-path sentences: the horse raced passed the barn fell; the old man the boat; The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families). Better to just rephrase: "there are ideas that are so much better."

Juhasz
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  • so much alternatives, or so many alternatives? Similarly, so much ideas or so many ideas? In 'much better ideas' much is fine because it qualifies 'better' and not directly 'ideas'. – Ram Pillai Jan 23 '20 at 01:27
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There are many better alternatives.

Think of a better alternative as a "bottle of beer", not just beer in general, which would be a collective term.
"much" is used to describe the collective, whereas "many" describes the individual items making up this collective.
And these items are countable. (theoretically)
If you refer to the individual bottles of beer - or the individual "better alternatives", you would say that there are "many" bottles of beer. And of course, "MANY better alternatives".

But with just beer, you cannot count it. So you would say "there's a helluva lot of beer..." oops!
I mean "there is much beer in that keg!"
Similarly you would NOT SAY there is "much better alternatives" as the keg is not full of amorphous better alternative stuff.

Actually - you could say there are "so many much better alternatives",
The "so" describes the "many", the "much" (adverb?) describes the "better" (adjective) and the "much better" describes the "alternatives" (noun).
Sufficiently confusing?

aqk
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  • This would benefit from some explanation of why this is correct. – KillingTime Jan 23 '20 at 07:24
  • @KillingTime well, I tried my best. I invariably got 50%-55% on English and French in school. I suspect the profs pushed me through. ;-) – aqk Jan 23 '20 at 07:56