Question from Cheryl, new Forum member (July 1, 2010):
“I haven’t seen George for a lot of years.”
I know it doesn't sound natural to use "a lot of" in the sentence above - the quantifier "many" being correct - but can anyone explain why from a grammar rule viewpoint? In most cases we can substitute "a lot of" or "lots of" for both much and many, so why not here?
My reply to Cheryl:
In informal conversations and writing, native English speakers very frequently use “a lot of,” “lots of,” and “plenty of” with both uncountable and plural nouns, as in “a lot of books,” “lots of time,” and “plenty of problems,” and they interchange these quantifiers at will, as in “lots of books” and “plenty of books,” “a lot of time” and “plenty of time,” and “a lot problems” and “lots of problems.” (And as you say, you'd rather use "many" as quantifier in such cases.)
In the specific case of the noun “years,” it’s actually idiomatic among native English speakers to interchangeably say “I haven’t seen George for lots of years” or “I haven’t seen George a lot of years,” as evidenced by these number of entries for them in Google—“a lot of years,” 15,700,000 results; “lots of years,” 1,940,000 results. (Here’s a random sample: “Retirement age really isn’t so very old. At 62 or 65 years of age you have lots of years to have fun.”)
To native English speakers, therefore, in contrast to your personal experience (I presume you are French), it’s perfectly natural to use “lots of years” or “a lot of years” to quantify “time” in general and “years” in particular. Our perception of what’s grammatically and idiomatically correct in language actually depends on the linguistic community we are living in, and it takes a lot of getting used to before we become perfectly attuned and comfortable with its idiomatic ways of saying things.
